There's been a lot of talk over the last few years about the semantic web. While Google and other search engines do a pretty good job of ranking web pages and providing relevant results to keyword searches, the truth is that Google doesn't really understand what you're asking it. Not in plain language anyway. We've learned to tailor our search habits to search engines as much as they've learned to adjust to our preferences.

The concept of a semantic web is based on the idea that machines can be taught to understand language more like the way people understand it. For example, a semantic web search engine would know the difference between John F Kennedy the person and John F Kennedy the airport. But the truth of the matter is that Google does a pretty good job of meeting your search needs. And that's why we were interested in speaking with Nova Spivack, the CEO and Founder of Radar Networks, one of the companies pioneering the Semantic Web.

Today Spivack is announcing Radar's first product. Twine is a "knowledge network," built on a semantic web platform. Basically you can think of Twine as a cross between Facebook and Google, with a little bit of del.icio.us thrown in for good measure.

We asked Spivack why Radar would focus on a social application rather than a search engine, and here was his response:

"Google's mission is to organize the world's information. And our mission is really to organize your information. Your information is really the most important information in the world. It's the other 90% of the information that Google isn't indexing really. I think that Google is doing a wonderful job of crawling the web. And in fact it's something that we plan to leverage. Certainly I don't think that it would make a lot of sense for any company today to directly compete with Google. And in fact, there's lots of opportunity in areas that Google isn't really strong at. And this is one of them."