For the last six years, San Francisco stealth startup Radar Networks has been developing what it hopes will be the first significant consumer application of the semantic web. On Friday at the Web 2.0 Summit, CEO Nova Spivack will give the first public details of his project, Twine.
Spivack, who co-founded EarthWeb and took it public in 1998, gave Wired News a preview of Twine, which is funded by Paul Allen's Vulcan Capital and Leapfrog Ventures. The high level idea is that while Google organizes the universe of information, Twine will organize your personal information. Right now, explains Spivack, your information resides in various locations on your computer, on different applications around the web, and within your multiple email accounts. To gather all your knowledge on a given area would be quite a chore.
Twine is a sort of knowledge management tool for the masses. Each user's Twine home page is a sort of personal dashboard—its central feature is a list of updates not unlike the Facebook News Feed—that allows a user to import any memo, website, video, or photo from anywhere on the desktop or internet. Twine then uses semantic web technology to organize automatically all of your information by theme and then infer what other information might also interest you.
While one can do this for private information, the shining hope for the application is that groups can use it to collaborate on a project or keep tabs on a certain subject of interest by each contributing to a communal information bucket called—get this—"a twine." While Twine isn't a social network, per se, Spivack assumes that users will create networks of friends who then share information.
Twine will begin its closed beta on Friday and gradually admit users until its real public launch next Spring. The site will be initially ad supported, with a paid version coming later to offer better features and fewer ads.
Spivack mentions he's filed several patents, including one for "semantic advertising." If Twine does well, the data collected about each person has the potential to be even better than the demographic and interest data held by Facebook and other social networks.
Twine plans to work with existing ad networks, at least at first. "We're not planning to start an advertising network yet," says Spivack. "Yet."
