Wayne D's Blog

I was pretty hard on twine.com last time I wrote about them. My views have moderated somewhat since then. Those of you who know me well know that I have a short attention span, a website has about 5 minutes to convince me that it's useful before I move on. Twine has filled a gap for me that has tormented me, sharing bookmarks. Up until I started using Twine.com I would end up emailing bookmarks to colleagues when I wanted to share a website. A couple of times I have bookmarked something at home and wanted to access it at work. I tried to use delicious but then I have to remember to make my bookmarks private so the whole world can't see them. Delicious also doesn't make it as easy to separate bookmarks into categories. A twine is a collection of things, websites, notes comments. Twines can be set to private or public when created. Twine.com provides a helpful bookmark applet you can drag onto your button bar that is far less intrusive than the Delicious.com bookmark too. The best part is that the bookmarklet applet lets you chose which twine you want to add an item to. I suspect I could do the same thing with the delicious.com tool bar but the five minute rule holds, if I have to spend more than five minutes trying to figure out how to do something I am likely to move on.

Though I have found Twine useful I also find it infuriating. The user interface is nonintuitive, it can be slow to respond. I think Twine.com has potential so that's why I'm sticking it out and seeing if it improves. I've documented my concerns on the twine user feedback thread. If you want to sample one of my Twine's you can check out Wikipedia exposed. I had another one I wanted to share but it was originally a private twine. When I changed it to a public twine all of the items I created in it retained their private property and I haven't figured out how to change it yet. If I didn't think Twine.com had potential I'd throw up my hands in frustration and run away but I'm prepared to give them a chance.