ReadWriteWeb

Twine is the most hyped semantic app of the season and recently opened up for some press previews. General availability of this smart, social bookmarking and research tool may come in a matter of weeks.

If that's the case, it will probably be too soon. Twine has some major shortcomings that I think are going to drastically hinder the service's adoption. Perhaps unsurprisingly, those shortcomings come down to usability and performance. Hopefully these problems will be resolved, but it isn't going to be easy.

Radar Networks, the home of the eagerly awaited semantic web app Twine, will announce on Monday that it's closed another round of funding, including a major investment from the fund lead by Ross Levinsohn, the man who bought MySpace while at Fox.

Super-sleuth Dan Primack over at PE Hub dug up the early news about the investment and Chris Morrison at Venture Beat says Velocity Interactive Group and a number of other investors are putting in money in the $15 to $20 million range.

The Semantic Web has been in the making for some time and people think it is nearing maturity. We have written about this trend extensively, with our two most notable posts being an analysis of the challenges of the classic bottom-up approach and the promise of the new top-down one. Regardless of how the Semantic Web will come about, for it to flourish it needs to hit the mainstream. There is no way that consumers will appreciate the elegance and mathematical soundness of RDF and OWL. People don't care about math, they care about utility and even more, about fun. What the Semantic Web needs, then, is a killer app.