Some Web Apps I am Beta Testing Pt 1

Lately I have made it a bit of a game to wrangle invites to private beta tests for web apps. I lost interest in the game a while back, but I got into some pretty interesting betas.

Twine
Twine was supposed to be this great new semantic breakthrough product. It was supposed to finally be able to gather information on the web, parse it, and make it useful and relevant. So says their PR and the article in the NY Times. My experience has been very different. As far as I can tell all it really is is an online bookmarking tool that automatically tags things you add to it. This would be great if it would go out and try to get more data on stuff it thinks you might be interested in, but all it does for me is give me links to other documents with the same tags.

I kept thinking that if I just kept adding stuff eventually it would start doing what I thought it was going to do. But I kept adding stuff and it kept not doing much of anything.

The semantic web is going to be huge when someone finally figures it out. The internet has way too much data and it needs a simple, intuitive way to organize all of it. While Twine seems to have the right idea they do not have it working yet, sadly.

Evernote
This is supposed to allow you to remember stuff. Like Twine the goal is a better way to organize information. The way the information is collected is a bit different than Twine, data can be clipped from a web site, emailed, or sent as an image. The latter is the most interesting part of the process to me. If you are on a web page and you want to save it you can either save the whole page, or highlight an amount of text and just clip that. You can email text to it, and you can take pictures and it will use OCR to try to decipher the text. All of your stuff is searchable by a number of methods.

I just started playing with this one recently, and my one critique is that it wasn't able to decipher the text in the pictures I sent from my phone. Other than that it works as described, which is pretty well.

This isn't an end-all to the problem of organizing data online but it is a good start. The concept is simple, the implementation is effective and it does what it says it does.

Later some others including Kango, Wuala, Polar Rose, and more.