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Twine expands semantic social network private beta

Twine Beta
Radar Networks has expanded its private beta of Twine, a social networking, bookmarking, and discussion site built with semantic web technologies. If that sounds a bit confusing, let's break it down a bit. Twine lets users create "twines," or web pages around a particular item, whether it be a web page, a generic topic, an idea, or a person. You can create a twine for yourself, your blog, or a concept like "web 2.0."

Other Twine members can join public twines or any twine they've been invited to share. Once you're a part of a twine you can add comments, add links or share items with another twine.

So where does the semantic web part come in? While you can add tags to items you submit, Twine uses some intelligent features to locate people, places, types of items, and other tags that pop up in your twines. Over time, it develops a sense of the items you're interested in and will start recommending new twines that you might want to join.

For more info on Twine, check out our interview with Radar Networks' Nova Spivack. Twine is still in an invite-only private beta, with a public beta launch scheduled for later this year.

Featured Time Waster

Civiballs is a beautiful, soothing physics puzzle Time Waster

CiviballsI have an absolute weakness for physics games, and while Civiballs isn't the strongest physics-based game, what it lacks in the physics department it makes up for a few times over in style and fun.

In Civiballs, you are presented with a few colored balls, and your goal is to get those balls into the same-colored urn on the level. The "civi" part of Civiballs is that there are 3 sets of levels to play, each representing a different civilization. While the civilization doesn't affect gameplay, the artwork for each level is beautifully themed to it's appropriate era.

To play the game, you are given only one tool - a sword with which to cut the chains that are holding the balls. The puzzle part of the game is in figuring out what order, and with what timing to cut each chain. Do it right, and all the right balls end up in the right urns, with no stray balls entering an urn (a no-no). Do it wrong, and you get to start over again.

Civiballs is not terribly deep on gameplay; the entire game can be completed in about 15 minutes. But if you enjoy this type of game, it will be a very enjoyable 15 minutes.

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