Numinous Nonsense

I have to admit, I’m quite excited about a new service that is coming out, Twine.com. Twine claims that it is a web 3.0 service that will allow you to “leverage collective intelligence” using semantic web technologies (i.e. technologies that use natural language patterns to understand and actually make sense of your data). From the press release:

Twine “ties it all together”

Twine pools and connects all types of information in one convenient online location, including contacts, email, bookmarks, RSS feeds, documents, photos, videos, news, products, discussions, notes, and anything else. Users can also author information directly in Twine like they do in weblogs and wikis. Twine is designed to become the center of a user’s digital life.

The Start of Web 3.0

“Web 3.0 is best-defined as the coming decade of the Web, during which time semantic technologies will help to transform the Web from a global file-server into something that is more like a worldwide database. By making information more machine-understandable, connected and reusable, the Semantic Web will enable software and websites to grow smarter,” said Spivack. “Yahoo! was the leader of Web 1.0. Google is the leader of Web 2.0. We don’t yet know who will be the leader of Web 3.0. It’s a bold new frontier, but Twine is a strong first step, and we’re very excited about it.”

It remains to be seen whether or not this will be a revolutionary service, but I suspect that theoretically it is heading in the right direction, and if web 3.0 is anything, it will be about integration. On top of Twine looking like a potentially revolutionary service, the founder and CEO of the company, Nova Spivak, sounds like a pretty amazing dude:

Mr. Spivack has a long-time interest in cognitive science, artificial intelligence, emergent computation, knowledge management and the emerging Semantic Web. As a grandson of management guru Peter F. Drucker, Mr. Spivack shares his family’s heritage of interests in management theory, nonprofits, and knowledge work. In addition, he has been a student of Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, art and culture for nearly 20 years and has pursued this interest extensively in monasteries, refugee camps and communities in Nepal, India, Europe and the USA. Mr. Spivack focuses his philanthropic activities on helping to fund the preservation of Tibet’s unique wisdom culture as a world-heritage treasure for the benefit of future generations.

A philosopher, Tibetan Buddhist, and the grandson of Peter Drucker!? I’ve got to meet this guy.