If Twine is the Semantic Web…
…please count me out. I’m a stubborn believer in the wisdom of people being necessary to harness, and benefit from, the power of machines. An increase in combined and collaborative knowledge? Great. Crowds in the cloud with the wizard standing behind a curtain? Not so much. As long as people don’t really want to know how any of it works, though, the wizards will remain.
Twine is the ‘Facebook killer’ hopeful, an invite only beta social network
launched by Nova Spivack’s Radar Networks.
Nick Carr likes it better than Freebase.
This social network proposes to make sense of all your personal information. The aim is to deliver benefits to you in the form of better tools for organizing your personal data and sharing it with others. Could it be that one of the ultimate goals is to create targeted advertising effective enough to make it impossible to distinguish from personal recommendation?
Read the Terms of Use page on Twine before you sign up. Rights to all information you contribute to Twine are granted in perpetuity, which is pretty standard. You retain, of course, all responsibility for inaccuracy and illegality, and so on. I read everything I could find on the site. One of the many things I did not find was any mention of delineation between personal and non-personal information, or any mention of user rights at all.
Most any publishing of information on the web can be deemed, under what will eventually be understood as common law use, to constitute the granting of redistribution licenses of some type. All of us who venture out here have personal responsibility for what we do and say in public. There are very few of us both knowledgeable and fortunate enough to remain totally anonymous on the internet forever. Anyone whose true goal is total anonymity avoids public places.
Personal privacy is not about having something to hide. It is an essential component of freedom, autonomy, and simple human dignity, as well as an important element in personal and family safety and security.
My wish for the day is to see the buzzword ‘transparency’ replaced with a more traditional and meaningful word, namely ‘responsibility’.
A perpetual wish is for linking ‘benefits’ to ‘respect’.
There is so much that we users could accomplish and benefit from, together, on a semantic web. Yesterday I read Tara Hunt’s post on The Brown Act of 1953, and was struck, as always, by the casualness with which many embrace these online tools, and also by the unspoken characterization of older, more cautious generations as an obstacle to progress. Much of that caution has a sound basis.
When I first started blogging in 2006, there was much public discussion about trust, especially following the ground breaking sale of MySpace. Trust is essential to human communication and interaction. Trusting a corporate entity is different from trusting a person. I, for one, am much more likely to trust you with my data if you recognize and respect my ownership of it.
Millions trust Facebook enough to submit their birthdate, a fact connected to their driver’s license, social insurance number, etc., online. Hundreds of millions have an account of some sort with Google, which has relatively comprehensive privacy policies and offers snail mail access to communication in case of problems. Millions of you may also join in making Twine one of the next hot destinations. As Danah Boyd says, “read those contracts!”.
October 28th, 2007 at 2:14 pm
Vera,
Certainly Twine is not a Semantic Web application; at least it is not the Twine beta as we see at present.
I agree with you that trust is a big issue for any real world semantic web applications and it is a pity that Twine has not paid enough attention to it, at least based on your discovery from its “term of use”.
I have another analysis of Twine. Probably you would like to watch it.
– Yihong
October 28th, 2007 at 4:56 pm
Hi Yihong and thank you for the link.
In your post you state that the grand question is, “Which philosophy does Twine want to bring to the world?”.
The only visible philosophy behind Twine is to make a lot of money. The means for doing so is through the standard model, namely the collection and manipulation of free content which people generously contribute. Our selfish motivation for donating the free content is the promise that it (Twine) will make our content better.
The technological innovation itself is interesting and exciting, but it is not what I posted about.
Twine is an it. A collection of machines and processes which are owned by a corporation. That corporation is in turn owned by individual stockholders and backed by venture capitalists, all of whom stand to make a lot of money if a) we participate in droves and b) the services deliver on the promise. If a) happens and b) doesn’t, Twine still owns our content in perpetuity, and the financial investment could still pay off in a big way as long as fiscal practices are sound.
That is all fine, as far as it goes, on the basis that technological innovation has to be funded somehow. All actions, though, have consequences. It is the potential consequence of Twine’s ownership of your or my data, in light of the way their privacy policies are or aren’t presented, that I find disturbing.
When we hand ownership of our private data over to Twine, or Facebook, or any other company, we are transacting. Entering into a transaction with documented contractual rights and obligations without knowing what they are is ‘normal’ only on the internet.
Sharing personal data within a communal group for the benefit of all the members is an entirely different concept and process. Google attempts to straddle some shifting line between the two concepts. Microsoft is acting on its intention to own property on both sides. What Twine wants from all of us is pretty clear. The cost of the transaction (to us) isn’t.
Vera