Twingly Blog

A gradual loss of function during Saturday evening turned into a complete failure of service on our Ping server at 5 am this morning. Indexing came to a grinding halt, immediately starting to build a huge backlog of pings. Our engineers worked through the problem and reconfigured the malfunctioning MySQL to not use as much memory on the server.

All in all, the backlog was not processed until some time after lunch. If you are missing any post in our index, please re-ping and get back to us if it still doesnt appear.

Big sorry to all bloggers who were the victims of the failure. We screwed up. Big thanks to Bjorn, Oskar and Niclas who made the fixer-upper thingies, shunning the warmth of the Swedish Sunday sun to solve tedious database troubles. You rock!

We have improved the Twinglywidget with a new filter that give more blogs attention from our partners. The filter is made so every blog can get only one link from each article. The latest relevant blog post from each blog is shown.

This brings attention to a larger number of blogs, but also deals with a previous error in the widget where the same blog post could happen to be shown duplicate times if it had been published under more than one URL. It also hinders some forms of abuse.

We would like to hear your opinion, leave a comment or trackback!

Amazon reports that they served 1.8TB of data to Twingly widget viewers during April, up from 1.0TB in March. The heavy increase is due to several new newspapers around Europe starting to use Twingly to link back to blogs.

The data volume corresponds to about 180M views of the Twingly widget. The volume is bound to increase further as we add more newspapers to our partner list.  

Our monthly Amazon S3 bill is now up to $1,447.45.

Which feature do you wanna see next? We have a lot of ideas and new cool features in the pipe but it’s quite hard to decide which we should focus on. That’s why we have an open tech plan so we could get some help from our beta users! Vote, suggest and comment on the features. Help us decide the future of Twingly!

We can’t guarantee that we devoloping any of the ideas or when we do it, but we really look at them for real. And we love feedback and ideas so please throw them on us! If you don’t have access to the beta, sign up or send an email to feedback@twingly.com.

Today we launch a next-generation blog search engine at Twingly.com. Participate in the invite-only beta by getting invited or signing up at beta.twingly.com. So what’s cool with the new Twingly.com?

Spam free, social search
Twingly takes a zero-spam approach to blog search using an algorithmically expanding white list instead of the traditional blacklist. Powerful moderation tools allows us to win the fight against spam by one-click removal of clusters of tens of thousands of spam blogs. Fat tail manual moderation yields quality input to long tail algorithmic filtering.

Social search features allows users to share quality content with each other and the community as a whole.

Powerful search language and tech plan Digg
Twingly provides the world’s most powerful search language for blogs, where search filters can be combined in new ways.

But we’re not done by far! Participate in voting on our tech plan by signing up for the beta. JSON api? OPML import or APML export? Help us decide what’s next!

Techcrunch post is here and Techcrunch UK here.

Dagbladet.no is the first Norwegian website to use Twingly to link back to blogposts that is linking to their articles. They have used our widget at some articles for a while now but since yesterday it’s used at the whole site, to our and the bloggers delight.

This means that we’ve got Twingly Partners in the whole Scandinavia! Yeey!

More:
Dagbladet.no - Vi linker till alla som blogger om oss (in Norwegian)

The daily newspaper Politiken was the first in Denmark to join the Twinglysphere, when they yesterday launched Twingly to link back to bloggers.

-With Twingly we hope that bloggers should add interesting comments to our editorial content, says Michael Arreboe, head of new media at Politiken. It is a part of our long term online strategy.

The reaction from the launch has been very positive in the national blogosphere where we currently index about 55,000 blogs.

Here is a sample of how Twingly look at Politiken (under the article): http://www.politiken.dk/tjek/digitalt/article467920.ece

OMG, we’ve been Techcrunched! Martin met Michael Arrington at the DLD conference this week and now there is a post about Twingly!

The post also contains some new information about the future of Twingly: Except the screenshot (see below) is there also an explanation how we gonna make our blog search engine spam-free!

Can you imagine a spam-free blog search engine? I promise we can, even though it’s quite hard to develop!

The search engine will be different from others, Källström says, in that it will be almost 100% spam free. How are they doing that? Instead of trying to index every blog in existence and then removing spam via black lists and other methods, they are limiting the blogs they monitor to those that are proven to be legitimate. They started with a small list of known blogs, and then spidered out from there based on links to other blogs. The assumption, which is fairly sound, is that good/real blogs will not link to spam blogs. The end result is a white list of real blogs that are indexed - everything else is ignored.

Martins transcription from the panel that discussed Humans Interupting Algorithms at the DLD conference was also published here. Martin, you rule! Links from both Read/WriteWeb and Techcrunch same week.

GLife is the first social network that starts using Twingly. They’ve already launched on Nightlife.se and Glife.se on all of their articles. Later, they’re also going to use Twingly as a trackback function on their member blogs.

The inclusion of Glife and Nightlife now mean that over 40 web sites are using Twingly to link back to blogs!

The biggest daily newspaper in Finland, Helsingin Sanomat launched Twingly today to link back to the blogs that link to their articles. In that way they will stimulate the blogosphere to cover their articles even more extensively.

- We look forward to the response from the Finnish blogosphere and hope for an interesting debate, says Lassi Kurkijärvi, Business Development Manager av Helsingin Sanomat Digitala Media. As the biggest newspaper in Finland we get a lot of attention from the bloggers. To develop that relation we now start to link back to the bloggers, and it will be exciting to see the outcome.

Twingly is currently indexing about 35,000 blogs in Finland and has a Finnish version of the ping service at Twingly.com