A year after launching its beta, Twine opened up today to the general public with a completely redesigned site. The relaunch got lots of coverage. Maybe you read some of it. Even if you did, you probably still don’t know what Twine does. Some semantic shit, right?
Exactly. Twine’s marketing department made the video above as a joke for their staff meeting today. (Warning:Turn the volume down, NSFW). In the voiceover, Candice Nobles, director of marketing at Radar Networks (which operates Twine) explains:
You use Twine to collect, find some shit, and share that shit with people you know. Twine ties it all together by topic, so you can have that shit in one place and it is easy for you to find it. You know what I’m sayin’?
I think that is the best explanation I’ve heard yet of what Twine does.
Click here to see the original version of the video.
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Love it.
FYI — for anyone who is curious. This video above was an INTERNAL practical joke the team played on me today.
The REAL and official video is here: vimeo.com/2019255 — as you will see it is much more “corporate.”
The team made the above video after the real video and then they showed me the joke video as if it was real. Needless to say I was speechless. Anyway, the team has been working very hard, and I have to say they definitely had me worried there for a minute. The joke was on me!
Sorry if anyone was offended by the content of the Unofficial video above. Again it was never intended to be seen by anyone outside the team. It was a practical joke. And yes, in very very very poor taste. Which is why it was funny.
Anyone who knows me knows that I am about as far from “Gangsta” as one could be.
“in very very very poor taste. which is why it was funny.”
are you serious? do you realize how many potential users you just alienated?
there is nothing funny about this parody. it’s funny to make fun of ghetto people? your marketing team should be fired. in fact, you should be fired. i take it back…this company won’t make it past spring.
I don’t think anyone was making fun of ghetto people. It was a rap video. Are you saying you think all rap videos are racist? Hmm. That sounds like a pretty racist statement actually.
The person who made the video actually used to have a rap song. A real one. They are a person of color, in fact. I don’t think they were being racist.
The team was trying to fool me into thinking this was the actual video. And it worked. I was worried. It’s called a practical joke. There is a long tradition of teams playing jokes on their CEO’s in Silicon Valley. It’s a way for a team to blow off some steam at cruch time. I
this was not a rap video. this was a parody on how ghetto people speak. nice gunshots at the end.
why didn’t you throw in the number of people who were killed in east oakland this week? wow, that would have been so funny, huh?
copycat idea with a jackass ceo. fail.
Uh no. But nice try. Hater.
Watch this video: http://latimesblogs.latimes.co.....rns-s.html
Rap parody of Sarah Palin.
Get a sense of humor. It’s not too late. Life is short.
If the market is younger people the video is fine. If it is the older baby boomer market which has the highest percentage of the population and the most money then it might not be the best marketing strategy. Still it got 70 + comments so it got people talking.
I call BS on Nova. If this was “internal” why put it on youtube?? Puhleeze…. This “leaked,” ended up on youtube, made it’s way to TC, all on accident?
The only funny thing is that you have to make a video in order for people to understand WTF it is your company does… FAIL. Deadpool within a year.
Hollah!
Actually, to the trolls here, I was just horrified. Horrified. It’s an outrage!!! The perpetrators of this terrible act of humor must be severely punished. It will not stand. The Axis of Humor must be eliminated.
Someone is VERY jealous Nova, or he is fucking with you
Your team rocks; much better than the official stuffy shit. Good to see a sense of humor. This will not bother anyone your company is targeting.
Give us more of these type videos!
I had no problem with it but I just want to clear it up, that was not a rap video, the Palin thing is. This is a 2Pac song played in the background with a VO.
If anyone had a problem with this “shit” they’re the wrong people for Twine, Nova. Don’t sweat it. I’ve been using it for months now and like how it has developed. Great tool.
said it before and i will say it again
any publicity is good publicity in silly valley
This is a great video. Hilarious, and very well done.
It’s a nice parody of the commercials that exploit hiphop to seem “cool”.
haha… interesting.
Horrible video. It sounded like I was listening to Charlie Brown’s tourettic teacher. I was looking for a straight-forward and easy to understand demonstration of what the service is. Instead, I still have no idea and am completely put off by the poor quality of the demo video. The cursing bothers me much less than the bad sound and lack of a clear explanation.
Clearly, I’m not their target audience. After 1 minute of watching, I still don’t have a clue why I should care, and I heard plenty of reasons why I should never visit their site.
Holy crap. that was awesome shi*t
The video seems appropriate. A number of colleagues and I were laughing endlessly at Twine this afternoon. One officemate offered that when the are almost out of cash someone may realize that Twine is actually the perfect random number generator (because there is no other way to describe how bad the results are).
It’s good to be you, isn’t it, Jerry.
Nothing works for me… Either a blank page or this error message:
http://209.112.245.111/dl/ARSS.....irefox.png
-Steve
so damn ghetto!
Pretty unprofessional, I would say. This is not a joke, but simply bad taste. I thought those guys were serious.
What a shitty marketing strategy. You ain’t gonna last long.
Lame. Have some class, would you?
“Our shit is dope” ….. um, okay if you say so.
Shit… guys.. this is fuckin’ gangsta shit.. I don’t get what the shit the biyatch was shitting about but the shit looks goood shit.. fucking shittable shit.. ya know what I m sayin’ get outta of my shit u shitty fucktard.. coz Im the cool shit.
Twine this shit you bitch.
tis is whadda i call d semantic shit..
LOL!!!! That was awesome. Doesn’t anyone else in Silicon Valley have a sense of humor? Some of the comments above indicate not. People: it’s ok to laugh.
I would absolutely love to laugh if there was a single funny thing about the video. Other than how laughably bad and what comically poor taste it was made in.
Poor taste? Dude. That was the point. The video was a practical joke for an internal team meeting. It would be in poor taste if it was the real video. The link to the real video is linked above in the thread.
Awesome if your only demographic is teenagers.
If you’re looking for something more serious and classy, check out Flowgram. It’s not necessarily about the semantic web, but it is a great tool for organizing, mixing, and customizing content.
yo, delicious does similar shit. it suggests tags-n-shit. why would i get my shit mixed up with other shit like that?
Unprofessional. Bad taste. No class.
No shit. That was the whole fucking point. MBA much? Douches.
Twine is doomed. Not just because they suck, but because they’re insultingly bad.
In troubling economic times good companies die, while bad companies shiit all over themselves, then die.
This is not a marketing strategy, it’s a death rattle.
That was gunfire at the end…wow…
IMNSHO a slightly Monty Python turn was called for. Some X-airborne types find that sorta thing rather abrasive. (Notice how many arguably sane people yammer about GTA and Saint Street? *sigh*)
Ha! Thanks for posting Eric. The funniest part is that I showed it to Nova as if I was presenting him the real video. You should have seen his face! Here is the link to the real video — vimeo.com/2019255
There are some comment trolls on this board it seems. Some people here have no sense of humor.
To all those screaming this is in “bad taste”, how many marketing videos have you made that almost guarantee coverage? You’re now talking about Twine. That is the whole point.
Those seemingly lacking a sense of humor - life is not half as serious as your worried mind appears to make out.
Agreed. Everyone here clicked to visit Twine. Look at the conversation. Now everyone is talking about how bad Twine is, but the video did exactly what it was supposed to do.
—
Everyone here clicked to visit Twine.
—
I didn’t.
Neither did I, but I’ve know about Twine (thanks RRW) for a looong time. I’m skeptical of their AI abilities, but the video is fine. I can’t believe how many whiny bitches there are:
“….more serious and classy, check out Flowgram”
Um, it’s now considered classy to post a competing service in the comments for another? FASCINATING!
I agree, Matt. I’m biased because of my relationship to the Twine team, but I thought it was hilarious.
What does “in bad taste” mean in the comments above? That they used a curseword, repeatedly? That they parodied hip-hop music?
Was the Amy Poehler-Sarah Palin SNL sketch this past Saturday also in bad taste? Many of my best friends are paid comedians in NYC and L.A. — I just showed it to them, and they thought it was hilarious.
I was ROTFLMAO;)
It showed that the Twine team doesn’t take itself too seriously, something that many of us in our peer/colleague group and in this industry (including myself) are guilty of for sure.
As marketing goes, I gotta agree that was (wait for it) … shit. However, it’s an internal video for staff. So it’s not “marketing”. But that makes me wonder why they would release it into the public.
I joined Twine. Still trying to figure out exactly what I’m supposed to use it for. After the video I thought it might be like Evernote, but it’s not. Then I signed up and thought I was in something more like <a href=”http://www.hi5.com. Then perhaps <a href=”http://www.twitter.com.
It seems like I can only collect shit from the net. Not a PDF from desktop, like with Evernote. And Evernote’s got an iPhone app.
They’d better get bought soon.
Twine can jiggle the babyholders too…lol
jiggle jiggle!
I can’t remember the time I laughed so hard. Thanks for putting this out Erick and thanks Nova and Twine team. We all need a good laugh sometimes, but this one was way over the top for me.
Thanks Alex. Yes, I thought it was pretty funny too. Once. I. Got. Over. The. Shock.
Holla!
Twine is down like 4 flats on a Cadillac
Yo Homeys — we are having the biggest traffic day for Twine EVAH. And site went down for a minute or two from overload. Will be up again in a few. We’re adding new features tonight and still tweaking the caching. Stay frosty.
y whitie gotta h8 on my niggas?
Yet another Web 2.0 similar startup with no business model. Definitely, heading for the Deadpool within a year.
WOW
Hilarious. Take a joke guys, this is funny.
Thanks to the Twine team for posting this and for having a sense of humor. A little too far? Yeah, but I got a great laugh out of this. It’s almost a shame we couldn’t get some spinners on the Twine Logo.
Who wants to bet that the real story here is the marketing department are attempting to create a viral video by saying the sweary video is not the “real” video…but it actually is.
I don’t believe a marketing department is stupid enough (or has enough free time) to make an offensive parody video of an original corporate video and leak it to the web - but I DO believe that a marketing department might think that a sweary video would get them WAY more press than an average corporate video…
Either way, well done to Twine - you got your 15 mins!
So your service is like del.icio.us?
Nope. It’s not the real video. The real video is here: http://www.vimeo.com/2019255
Steve Spalding over at How To Split an Atom has a great piece up on Twine and Delicious if you’re interested;)
Interesting theory, but I think a dangerous game to play right now. Looking at the site, I wonder what is the business model. A viral play would certainly pull in more page views, unique visitors and so on, but what’s the end game?
Twine helps you track your interests. Leveraging the wisdom of crowds, and artificial intelligence, working together.
Under the hood we’re building a next-generation recommendation engine that learns about your interests as you add content to Twine, and helps you discover more things you might like.
Monetization / endgame: More targeted personalized marketing engine. In other words, Twine will give users recommendatioons from friends, groups, Twine, and also from sponsors (clearly marked as such) that directly related to their interests. Instead of advertising. Will be more relevant than ads and users will have more control.
Yo Nova Bro… stop whining all over the message board.
go back to your basement and rework on what you are REALLY trying to do.. Seriously.. its hard to understand what Twine provides me at the end of the day… “Say it Twines” or something
This has been a serious problem with all ppl (incl TBL) doing semantic shit… You guys have a hammer and you are looking for a wall..
Go out do something real.. and then see if the hammer is really needed.
Seems to me that a lot of people missed that this was an internal video and not the real marketing piece. That’s unfortunate as people may draw the wrong conclusion on the service.
Having watched both videos, I’m still unclear the problem Twine is trying to solve and why I need the product. There could be a damn good reason why I should use the service, but it doesn’t pop out to me from either video. To put it another way, I’ve got enough of my own “shit” to process so I’m not in the market to get other people’s “shit”.
Internal video that gets leaked, YEAH right. 2pac’s still lives too.
What kinda marketing idiots call their own users’ content ’shit’, even as practical joke? That’s just rude shit.
The shots we hear at the end is the company shootin’ itself in the butt and the foot’s what! The word’s just gonna stick to the company now like……yeah, shit!
It ain’t about humor trolls or none of that jack. It’s dumb, dumb, dumb and shit.
Organize that Shit!
Straight up.
^5
Why, why, why? How is this news and how is it appropriate for what is supposed to be the number one resource for Web 2.0 startups. This belongs on CollegeHumour or the like. Schonfeld did you drop all your journalistic credentials at the door when you signed on at TechCrunch. Try going a week without writing an expletive. I know you are capable of better. This is embarrassing.
Is anyone else grossly offended by this?*
* by “this” I mean Twine’s service.
great video, this can be viral.
Not that’s some silicon valley shit right there!
is it April 1 today?
Am I the only black dude here who doesn’t find the video funny, and borders being offensive?
Oh yeah right, like a black “dude” would call themselves “Mr. Brown.” Liar.
that’s some crazy shit right there.
What is wrong with all the hyper-sensitive white people out there? This video is hillarious. Those of you who somehow feel offended (I have no idea how you would be) should lighten up, get out of your cube, and meet some real people. Pointing out perceived acts of racism just to justify some residual white person emotional guilt and come across “above it” is not just elitist, but its fucking stupid. Grow up!
Word to your mother!
The video is ok, but Twine is… well, not much at all. I’m looking at it and seeing nothing more than a messy del.icio.us.
can you say shit and not laugh
http://www.youbundle.com
launched yesterday too as a finalist at the i-stage CES conference in Vegas.
We dont have all that good “shit”
however we are reaching out to the internet users to create a database of search results based on their passions.
Come and give us a try for that regular “shit” that everybody likes.
I think the video is funny .. I dont know why people are getting all bent out of shape .. I laughed and laughed .. and sent it to my friends ..
There is nothing wrong with the video it was meant to be a joke ..
This video reminds me of the movie “Idiocracy,” (only it sounds a little more intelligent than the movie.)
This person could have been the speech writer for the President’s address to Congress in the House of Representin’.
This is how all business descriptions should be.
http://www.SchoolShift.com
Do well in school and shit.
the PC valley hippies need to chill out and get a sense of humor. honestly, being so hyper sensitive makes you more racist. you’re so fixated on people being different, you can’t accept that some people just don’t care and don’t see a difference.
Seconded heartily! - Getting the proportions of minorities in line with a wider scope, for example, is not equality. To get the proportions ‘right’ you have to count, and if you count you’ve missed the point.
Awwww snap! Any time political correctness can be poked in the eye, it should be. Great job on this, Twine folks. Internal or not, I’m glad it showed up here.
Can haz more Candice? (No shit!)