Web 3.0: Twining It All Together

Since the coining of the phrase "Web 2.0" people have been talking about Web 3.0 will be. Some (including myself) say a big part of this is the Mobile Web, accessed from anywhere with a plethora of devices instead of just on your personal computer. Others see it as primarily focused on tying all the different parts of the web together into one big happy... Thing. But everyone agrees it will involve, at least in part, the arrival of the Semantic Web.

From the start the Internet has been geared towards readability by humans. Although search engines like Google may appear to have a grasp on what information is out there, computers have little or no real understanding of the meaning of the data we put into them. So, as the Web grows it becomes increasingly more difficult for our computer friends to sift through the sea of online data to find the information we really desire.

That's where the Semantic Web comes into play. According to the American Heritage Dictionaries, semantic means "Of or relating to meaning, especially meaning in language." The goal behind the Semantic Web is to give computers an understanding of what the internet's immense amounts of information actually means. This means cataloging that data with tags that computers can grasp.

To semantically categorize the entire Web would be next to impossible, partially because the Web grows at such a phenomenal rate. That brings us to Twine. It is making an attempt at being the first "mainstream semantic web application." It aims to index your entire digital life: emails, bookmarks, documents, RSS feeds, contacts, photos, videos, product info, data records, etc. into something meaningful not only to you, but to the Twine engine itself. You will then be able to search that data - And not just your data but the data of all your friends that use Twine. When you search it will tell you not only what it found but who it belongs to, organizing your results by how close that person is to you. There will be plenty of browser plugins, widgets and programming APIs to help you add to and take data out of Twine.

Unfortunately, although Twine has been officially announced, it isn't yet available for public use. You can however sign up on their website to be beta tester once beta testing goes public.

Read: Twine.com, Tech Crunch, sramana mitra, App Scout