Twine - tagging with an "intelligent personal Web assistant

Here is a new web-based application that everyman can employ to automatically extract names of people, places, companies and other entities from email and documents. It's called Twine, and the New York Times gave it a glowing review.

An Online Organizer That Helps Connect the Dots by Anne Eisenberg, New York Times (Feb 3)

"Customers have individual accounts on Twine’s Web site, where they save URLs or other information. They can make their collections, or “twines,” private, share them in groups with other members having common interests like politics or fashion, or even make the twines public."

Twine automatically tags according to its recognition of entities and can assign a subject from what it can infer the paper is about. Users can also add their own descriptive tags. People participating in the current test have been pleased with the results.

Twine is accepting registrants for the Beta test to begin in the next couple of months.

From the Twine site: "... in a nutshell Twine uses the Semantic Web, natural language processing, and machine learning to make your information and relationships smarter. But if that’s all Greek to you, just think of Twine as your very own intelligent personal Web assistant, working for you behind the scenes so you can be more productive."

This has tremendous potential as a social tool for groups of all kinds - any set of people who would benefit from sharing documents - as well as a personal productivity tool for individuals.