Twingl sounds like an interesting idea. I would guess it is only fully appreciated after using it. The image from the data of the 30 users is beautiful, if nothing else. Day 7? You're at the beginning of this portion of your journey of creating this, good luck. Any feedback from the people using it yet?
I've been using it for 24 hours and I'm into it. It's a much more organic way to save and organize my reading patterns online. I am looking forward to peaking back in a week, a month, or a year and see how my patterns have changed. Also, backlinking. When I link a comment on hubski to a quote in another article and then I reread the original article, it takes me back here. I just ended up back in this thread after noting a comment in "The future of software, the end of apps, and why UX designers should care about type theory" which brought me back to the medium article which brought me back here. That spiraling and revisiting is key to understanding and thinking and developing thoughts over a period of time. It is also something that rarely happens when I'm reading online. I read. I like. I share. I read the next one. Our brain is great at making connections. Comparing, contrasting, connecting is the core of how we form opinions and come to conclusions. The act of reading, highlighting and then linking is easy enough to be non-disruptive to the thought process but active enough to allow my mind to digest and acknowledge what I'm reading and acknowledge the connections I'm making as I read. Zygar Addition / More thoughts: The ability of reviewing and more fully processing my thoughts has become more and more apparent since I began using it. I find myself spiraling back to previous readings more and more and being more focused and intent while reading new things. I find that I the process of connecting things using Twingl has started to change how I think while reading. Instead of ignoring the connections I am semi-consciously making, which are usually seemingly random or pointless, I am more aware and thoughtful towards them. I no longer ignore them and instead seek out to compare this new information to things I already know. I highlight passages and sentences with the expectation that in the future I will link back to it and it will help my thoughts become more fully realized. The fact that I know that anything I highlight, be it boring or quite exceptional, will be saved in my Twingl forever* makes it feel a bit more worthwhile to read. I'm sure many know the feeling of reading late night or while at work and knowing that something is meaningful but simultaneously knowing you probably won't recall it in a couple days. You absorb it but it just sort of sits there until you forget about it. And this slowly makes you a bit more apathetic to really truly reading and thinking about stuff you read. Hubski makes the full articles and my thoughts more meaningful because I can share them with others, see other's interpretations, and discuss them. I enjoy looking back on the things I commented or posted weeks or months ago and recalling that information. TNG's archives have that same appeal to them - an online sort of journal capturing your travels and interests over time. Saving articles with apps like Evernote etc is cool, but you often don't really remember what or why or how you saved the article months later. I have been guilty of copy + pasting a passage to evernote, never to look or understand it again. Why did I save this? Who knows. With twingl your journey online and reading is something like a really badass journal. It keep track of as much or as little as you want it to. This journalling/recalling/reviewing process is really unique and cool. It's almost like having your own personal wikipedia or tvtropes. You could journey back through your online experience forever, hopping from note to note to note. The ability to view and journey through other user's twinglings would be fascinating. That sort of in depth voyeurism with thoughtful people is really appealing to me. All you know is this other person's journey. You know nothing about them, only the types of things they read and enjoy. I feel like I could get to know someone quite well by looking at their links and notes and comments.
Damn, thanks for the awesome writeup insomniasexx—it pretty much exactly captures the intent behind Twingl. There is something about the medium of the web that—even when you're actively working towards a goal, such as writing an article or planning a presentation—encourages wide reading, but not deep reading. We create bookmarks on the promise that we'll return to an article again later—but all you end up with is a 20 character title and a link—you lose all context. What is this link? Why did I bookmark it? When was I here? I grew somewhat phobic of bookmarking; knowing that if something went in there, it wasn't coming back out again. Tabs would stay open until I'd finished with them "permanently", but that's not how the creative process works—we work hard on a problem, get stuck, and retrace our steps, discovering insights that we hadn't seen before. thenewgreen, this week has been spent entirely on "getting out of the building" and talking to people; and most of the feedback has been either of insomniasexx's type, or a general sense of "ok this is a cool idea, but why would I use it?" Positioning is the big challenge at this point. P.S. The latest "brain" photo—19 days in! I'm the big cluster in the bottom left, insomniasexx is the third largest cluster just to the right. My co-founder is the huge one to the north. You can see some pretty interesting trends begin to emerge—like minded people naturally pull together because they are reading—and importantly, reacting to—the same things. It would be particularly fascinating to see the way a social network such as Hubski would self-organise in a system like this—I suspect individual online communities would start to resemble cities. You'd have the space geeks over here, the book club over there, etc.