Twine, del.icio.us, and event-driven service integration

Last week on Interviews with Innovators I spoke with Nova Spivack about Twine, a service that’s been variously described as the first mainstream semantic web application and “just del.icio.us 2.0”. You’ll find support for both points of view in my conversation with Nova. It’s true that, unlike del.icio.us and other comparable services, Twine is built squarely on top of what Nova calls a “semantic web stack.” But it’s hard to discern, in Twine’s current incarnation, just what that entails.

One of the bookmarks I imported into Twine, for example, is http://www.educause.edu/HEBCA/623. It’s the home page for an organization called the Higher Education Bridge Certification Authority (HEBCA). In Twine, the item shows up tagged as an Organization. That’s the kind of thing that you’d expect a semantically-aware service to do. But what does it mean for Twine to classify HEBCA as an Organization? It’s unclear. Here’s the offered link. It points to a small collection of items that mention HEBCA, but Twine does not “know” anything at all about HEBCA.

What our conversation revealed, though, is that my method of testing Twine — which involved importing all my del.icio.us bookmarks — was flawed. I had assumed, incorrectly, that Twine would absorb the bookmarked pages themselves. It will, but it doesn’t yet, currently it only aborbs the del.icio.us metadata such as title and link. If you want to find out what Twine’s linguistic and semantic analysis can do, you need to pump content into the system.

That’s easier said than done. The only API available for content injection is email. Twine materializes a private email address to which you can send items you want to post as private notes.

I spent a few minutes thinking about writing a script to automate the injection of items I bookmark on del.icio.us. It’s doable, of course, but only by dint of hackery that I would undertake grudgingly and normal folks would never imagine or attempt.

This kind of integration will get a whole lot easier for everyone when the various services export events representing our actions within them. For example, a couple of weeks ago I reorganized my del.icio.us tagspace, adding the tag socialinformationmanagement to a group of otherwise-tagged items in order to emphasize that particular facet. And I tweeted:

Imagining new kind of FriendFeed event: “Jon Udell updated 9 del.icio.us bookmarks, adding the tag socialinformationmanagement”

In other words, when I perform a public action in some service — like bookmarking an item in del.icio.us, or even just retagging an existing item — the service posts an event on a topic to which other interested services subscribe. In this case, FriendFeed is the interested service. When I configure FriendFeed to monitor my del.icio.us account, it asks del.icio.us for the list of event types that it exports, and I choose which of those to display in FriendFeed.

Of course FriendFeed needn’t be only an event subscriber. It can and should be a publisher too. Another service should be able to ask FriendFeed for the list of event types it aggregates for me — bookmarking an item on del.icio.us, posting a photo on Flickr, adding a book to my LibraryThing library — and then subscribe to all or just some of those events.

(While we’re at it, I want a service that can not only subscribe to my aggregated event feed, but also take actions. One of the actions I’d configure would be: When Jon bookmarks a new item on del.icio.us, fetch the item and inject it into Twine using the specified secret email address.)

Of course there’s nothing new here with respect to basic change notification. Weblogs.com has been doing that in the blog realm for many years. Now it’s time to generalize the mechanism across the range of services that manage various aspects of our online lives.