Scott Koegler
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Twine, the combination social search, interest-based networking system, is about to disappear, to be supplanted by Twine’s successor.

Twine was touted as a breakthrough as it was being developed, as it presented a platform for a consumer audience to develop relationships about topics they were interested in. During the initial roll-out there was significant clamor for the limited number of login credentials, but soon after larger numbers of new users were granted access many of them raised questions about the actual purpose and use of the product.

Radar Networks, headed by Nova Spivack, the company’s CEO, has apparently taken several lessons from the first version of Twine, and over the past year has developed Twine’s successor, called T2. I had the opportunity to talk with Nova to understand the motivation behind T2 and the future of Twine, and my impression is that T2 is a substantial step forward, not just for Radar Networks, but for the advancement of applications using semantic data underpinnings.

(Read more and hear Scott’s interview with Nova Spivak by clicking “continued” below)

There are four main points to Nova’s explanation, so listen for them in the interview.

Click Start arrow below to hear Nova Spivack interview.

The first, and most significant technological step, is that the company has been able to overcome the limitations imposed by the very structure of the “triple,” the basic relationship structure of semantic data. Triple-stores can easily accumulate billions and even trillions of data elements, making storage and access, particularly in real time, a significant block to building out large semantic networks. We didn’t talk about the specifics of their technology in this regard, but being able to create a triple-store of the magnitude necessary to index large portions of the web is significant.

The second point is T2′s ability to automatically generate a semantic index from data on the web that does not already contain RDF / RDFa information. In fact, this may be the most significant advancement in actually creating the semantic web, because the vast majority of web content is not, and will probably never include the RDF information if left to content providers.

The third step is the presentation of search results in a “faceted” view. In the accompanying video, Nova demonstrates how T2 allows search results to be focused on the actual information wanted from millions to a dozen in just a few clicks.

And the fourth point is the phasing out of Twine. Nova explains that current Twine data and user accounts will be migrated into T2, so that any connections that users have developed there will be available in T2. However, I wonder about the usefulness of that data once T2 becomes available. There may be social networking components available in T2 that are not apparent from the current information, but clearly T2 is focused on search, as Nova explains.

My interview with Nova provides a good explanation of the future of Twine/T2 — and possibly a shift in the future of search.

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