A new way to connect

I was browsing through a site called Twine and decided to make a post about it and its uses for others and myself. Basically, Twine is a shared blog with extras. You start off by creating a Twine and then decide whether you want to make it private or public. Next, you can start adding content in any form, images, video, bookmarks and comments. Here's where the sharing comes in, if you decided to keep it private but want some friends to add material you can invite them to join your twine and contribute. If your twine is public anyone can add new material to it. This is a very cool concept because it allows for collaboration on topics that otherwise would be a lot more difficult and it can really expand your twine a lot faster. You sort of decide what type of topic seed to plant and then you can sit back and watch it grow as others contribute to it.

Once you become a part of the Twine community and use it for a little while the website will begin to pickup on your interests and then start suggesting twines or posted items that you might be interested in. The website will also try to connect you with other "twiners" that match your interests thereby increasing the sense of community. Now, I must mention that Twine was opened to the public just last year in October 2008, so although there is already a significant number of users and a decent amount of content on Twine, it doesn't seem to be extremely popular yet so don't be expecting something like Facebook. But, just give it some time and I think that as time goes on and it gets more exposure Twine will grow to considerable status.

Some additional features of the site are pretty cool as well such as the user interface. The interface is very well done and pleasant to look at as well as convenient to use. There are also a number of ways to keep you updated such as the Twine interest feed, an email digest, or an RSS feed.

Now I would like to discuss a little bit more in detail some of the content I found on Twine that relates to the issues I would like my blog to encompass and might be of interest to my readers. First of all, since I am interested in international relations I found a World News twine. The creator of this twine asked people to post news from around the world and so far has received news from a number of different countries. I was also curious if there were already twines on Iran and there were a number of them from various individuals like this one www.twine.com/twine/118klqc8s-5rg/iran. The potential for something like this is amazing once the numbers of users grow. For instance, I imagine myself hearing about a political event (like an election) in Israel or Iran and then starting a new twine and asking others from those countries to contribute their feelings or opinions on the event. To be able to instantly (or at least relatively quickly) assess an event in a foreign country from multiple perspectives is something I find quite interesting.

Well that's it for my Twine spiel, if it sounds interesting, please don't hesitate to check it out for youself and join the community.