Twingly Blog

Parallelly with our launch last week Martin and I (Anton) exhibited The Next Web in Amsterdam, one of Europes coolest web 2.0-conferences. With speakers like Robert Scoble, Kevin Rose and Chris Saad it was awesome. A lot of interesting people, talks, startups (like Twingly!) and Diggnation broadcasted direct from the scene. We are definitely happy with The Next Web visit. See you next year!

Tending to our trip to Amsterdam De Telegraaf, a large newspaper in the Netherlands, have launched Twingly on their site! They have one of the better implementations of the widget (if you ask me) and the blogosphere in Netherland seems to be pretty happy with it!

From Amsterdam with love

/Anton

Some pictures from The Next Web (you’ll find many more here):

Photo: ©Pieter Baert

Photo: Anne Helmond

Photo: Charles Nouÿrit

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.

Rumors that have long flourished in the Valley have now been confirmed: Microsoft buys 1.6% of Facebook for 240 MUSD. Microsoft is above all buying themselves access to one of the world’s largest user bases. This means they’re also taking on Google head on and will be competing directly with them when it comes to creating the largest platform for social applications.

Having Microsoft and Google competing directly within the social media sphere will certainly push the development of an open social platform forward.

In combination with the anticipated revolution in mobile Internet usage we can be sure that 2008 will be the year where platforms for secure profile sharing between applications and services will become a reality, ending the need for a multitude of user accounts.

The popular microblogging service Jaiku was yesterday acquired by Google for a sum yet unknown. The founders, Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen, went public with the news on their microblog and blog yesterday to the surprise of many. On their FAQ about the acquisition they’re writing:

Q: What is Jaiku?
A. Jaiku is an activity stream and presence sharing service that works from the Web and mobile phones. Jaiku, Ltd. was founded in February, 2006 by Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen from Finland. The service was released on the Web in July 2006. Jaiku is based in Helsinki.

Q: Why did Google acquire Jaiku?
A: Activity streams and mobile presence are important areas where we believe Google can add a lot of value for users. Jaiku’s technology and talented team are a great addition to Google’s current application and mobile teams.

Interesting enough Google decided to acquire Jaiku and not the more popular, and similar, Twitter, which is very popular in the US. Jaiku was cheaper and in many ways a better service. When Twitter focused on fast user growth Jaiku chose to focus on innovation.

tartups in the social networking genre really have two options if they want to be acquired. Either they have the largest user base or are the best innovators. Facebook has a large user base; Jaiku has an innovative service with a growing user base. Google has for a long time known that it is better to buy innovation than users. Judging from their acquisitions only YouTube and DoubleClick were market leaders in terms of users in their respective niches.

In the future I think it will be much more common for Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and other big actors to acquire early. Jaiku certainly had a user base but had not had any success similar to that of the other big recent acquisitions: YouTube, Del.icio.us or Flickr.

Congratulations to Jyri, Petteri et al! We wish you good luck with your new masters.

This blog post can be read on this blog, through an RSS reader or perhaps even through somebody’s Facebook profile. If another blog writes about the same subject and links to this post it will be visible through that blogs RSS feed, somebody else’s profile and in hundreds of other RSS readers. Somebody comments this post. Someone else comments the same thing but on another blog that writes about the same thing. Content and conversation are being spread out in several places.

A VC writes about how content is no longer connected to a specific location but rather distributed through numerous different channels on the internet. Not only the content, but the whole of the conversation is available in other places than the comment field of the blog itself. Why shouldn’t it be possible to comment on a blog post directly in the RSS reader which then gets synchronized with the other comments?

We need to think of content as bits that can be created, assembled, re-assembled, anywhere at any time. Because that is, in fact, what digital content is. I am slowly but surely breaking the content I create up into parts and creating them in different places and then re-assembling them in various ways. The posts I write and the comments you and I create don’t have to be housed in the same system and they aren’t anymore.

Steve Rubel has similar thoughts: we need to stop thinking about web pages and start thinking about web services where everything is portable, like a big cut-and-paste table where you can assemble your favorite services in any way you see fit. What matters today are widgets; web site traffic has therefore lost some of it’s relevance.

Don’t wait. Start now to make everything on your website embeddable. Traffic is becoming something that happens elsewhere, not just on your site.

Union Square Ventures were one of the participants in a newly completed round of financing of Twitter. They’re motivating their participating in an interesting article:

There is something really powerful about public, asynchronous text communications where a reply is not expected. A great example is blogging. You blog something and it’s out there on the Internet for public consumption. Others read it and they either comment or create their own blog post in reaction. Collectively, we engage in a discussion.
The asynchronous aspect of blogging is critical because “real time” conversations such as conference calls don’t scale past something like 20 people. Keeping the communication public is equally vital. When anything is made totally public with no limitations on who can participate, you create an open market for ideas, thoughts, and opinions.

Blogs and microblogging tools like Twitter and Jaiku are examples of how the Internet has created a wholly new form of communication that, by virtue of being asynchronous, allows dozens or hundreds of individuals to participate in a huge conversation without geographical limitations. It’s a possibility that’s not existed at any point earlier in world history.
Blogs and microblogs will keep evolving and remain an important feature of the online world for the foreseeable future. Having millions of people participating on equal terms in a conversation the size of the current blogosphere is something unique and as far from a passing fad as you could possibly go.