Group items tagged

Evri Ties the Knot with Twine — Twine CEO Comments and Analysis March 11th, 2010  Share Today I am pleased to announce that my company, Radar Networks, and its flagship product, Twine, have been acquired by Evri. TechCrunch broke the story here. This acquisition consolidates the two leading providers of semantic discovery and search. It is also the culmination of my long and challenging venture to pioneer the adoption of the consumer Semantic Web.

At the time of beta launch and for almost six months after, Twine was still very much a work in progress. Fortunately our users and the press were fairly forgiving as we worked through evolving the GUI and feature set from what was initially just slightly better than an alpha site to the highly refined and graphical UI we have today. During these early days of Twine.com we were fortunate to have a devoted user-base and this became a thriving community of power-users who really helped us to refine the product and develop great content within it.

These losses meant we could no longer create compelling content or to manage the Twine community. So we put Twine.com on auto-pilot and let the traffic fall off. While painful to watch, this at least had the benefit of reducing the pressure to scale the system and support it under load, giving us time to focus all our energy on getting T2 finished and raising more funds.

Today we’re debuting lists in Google Bookmarks, an experimental new feature that helps you easily share those sites with friends.Bookmarks are a great way to keep track of your favorite content across the web and we want to help you share them with your friends. To use lists, visit Google Bookmarks at google.com/bookmarks or by clicking “Manage all” in your Google Toolbar. From there, select the links you want to share and click “Copy to list.” Lists are private by default, but once you’ve created one you can share it with specific friends or even publish it to the web. For example, if a friend of yours is visiting Seattle for the first time and you have some local attractions bookmarked, you might want to create a new list for “Seattle attractions” and share it with your friend.

Google will algorithmically analyze your list to identify other potentially relevant links, such as the Seattle Aquarium. Similarly, when we detect that a list is relevant to a specific region, we provide a map of those places and relevant info for each place, such as addresses, hours and reviews.

The Drupal admin feels like it was developed by a developer while the Wordpress admin feels like it was developed by an end-user.

Even after improvements by Drupal, Wordpress probably still wins the ease of admin game

To display Rich Snippets, Google looks for markup formats (microformats and RDFa) that you can easily add to your own web pages."