Twine is a service that lets you track your interests and discover new content that you care about, based on the bookmarks of the other 100,000 users who use it. On top of that, there are a million people who just read Twine every month, which means it's on track to be bigger than Delicious soon. Learn more about the human-curated web straight from Twine's Nova Spivack at SXSW.

Twine Overview from Twine Official on Vimeo

Almost exactly one year ago, we wrote about Twine, a social network built on the semantic web. After expanding the private beta back in March, the Twine team has spent the last eight months really working on site usability, interface and performance. Today, Twine 1.0 is officially out of beta and open to the public.

I had a chance to talk to Nova Spivack, the CEO and founder of Radar Networks-- the company behind Twine -- last week and he walked me through the service. I have to say, as someone who was intrigued by the idea of Twine before, but frustrated by its interface, the new Twine kicks ass.

Twine describes itself as an "interest network," you could also call it a semantic web portal. I like to think of it like Delicious on crack. Like Delicious, and Stumble Upon and to a lesser extent, Digg, Twine is a way to manage and share links of interest. Unlike those services, Twine will also work to scour the web for information related to your interests and can help organize information into more useful snippets.

Radar Networks has expanded its private beta of Twine, a social networking, bookmarking, and discussion site built with semantic web technologies. If that sounds a bit confusing, let's break it down a bit. Twine lets users create "twines," or web pages around a particular item, whether it be a web page, a generic topic, an idea, or a person. You can create a twine for yourself, your blog, or a concept like "web 2.0."

Other Twine members can join public twines or any twine they've been invited to share. Once you're a part of a twine you can add comments, add links or share items with another twine.

So where does the semantic web part come in? While you can add tags to items you submit, Twine uses some intelligent features to locate people, places, types of items, and other tags that pop up in your twines. Over time, it develops a sense of the items you're interested in and will start recommending new twines that you might want to join.

For more info on Twine, check out our interview with Radar Networks' Nova Spivack. Twine is still in an invite-only private beta, with a public beta launch scheduled for later this year.

We hear a lot of talk about the "Semantic Web" these days. The idea is that search engines like Google are inherently dumb. Sure, they do a pretty good job of returning accurate results to keyword searches. But because id doesn't actually understand natural language, you can't ask Google a straightforward yes or no question and expect an answer. Just search results.

Of course, for the most part, Google does a pretty good job of giving you what you're looking for. That's why Twine's Nova Spivack told us recently that his company decided to build a semantic social networking site rather than a search engine. But startup True Knowledge has its sights set on Google, Yahoo, and the other big names in search.

The True Knowledge search engine is currently in private beta, so you can't really check it out yet. And that makes us take everything in this demo video with a grain of salt. For all we know, True Knowledge can still only answer questions about J. Lo appropriately, but doesn't know the difference between Jennifer Lopez and Jennifer Beals.

That said, True Knowledge does look pretty interesting. We like the way that the web application does more than spit out a bunch of relevant web pages, but rather gives you an answer and then shows its work.

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."