I saw your offer of March 8 to jump the beta invite queue by writing a blog post talking about why I want a Twine beta invite. I read Marshall Kirkpatrick’s review, Paul Miller’s thoughtful roundup, Laptop magazine’s pan, your thoughtful and humble response, Profy’s meta-response about alpha vs. beta, Frederick Giasson’s comment that the network is not there yet, and Richard MacManus’s defense. I felt empathy for you because at Kango we are also working on an application that utilizes semantic analysis and it is also somewhere between alpha and beta. I guess the fact that we have less celebrity status that you is both good and bad!

My 3 reasons for wanting a beta invite:

1. I’m a semantic web fanboy.

I can see the promise of Semantic Web for the future although I think much of the early visionaries (Tim Berners-Lee and yourself included) may not have it right about how we will get to the end-state. But I want to try Twine so I can see more of the future through what you have tried to do with Twine. I can’t promise to be an uncritical reviewer of Twine. But I think Semantic Web is in the down part of the Gartner Hype curve:

I believe that the Semantic Web will eventually come into being and Twine will be one key milestone.

2. I’m a sympathetic fellow entrepreneur launching an alpha-ish beta product.

My product is in private beta and we are trying to decide when it is ready for public beta. I want to learn from your experience and the coverage you received. How can we convince bloggers to go easy on us once we come out in public beta? We just want people to use our product so we can improve it faster. But I don’t want to create inflated expectations that results in people panning our service.

3. I want to engage in a dialogue with you about the Semantic Web.

We’ve been pretty heads down trying to solve the problem of user review aggregation to aid in travel planning. We have been using some semantic analysis to parse the reviews. I think dialog with you would help sharpen our approach. And who knows how we can be helpful to Radar Networks and Twine. If nothing else, we can be enthusiastic fellow travelers who can being a sounding board to each other.

Nova, look forward to hearing back from you. And help yourself to a beta invite to Kango if you want. Just give me a chance to talk with you about it before you pan us on your blog, and I’ll do the same!