Twingly Blog

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

This post was written by Anton

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.

This post was written by Anton

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!

This post was written by Anton

Myself (Carl Fredrik), Martin, Oskar and Jörgen are on an excursion to Paris and the conference LeWeb3. I was here last year too - then it was an basically an orgy of politicians using the conference as a platform to launch their presidential bids.

This year it’s much better: a wonderful mix of web crews, researchers, Silicon Valley-esque individuals (with gaudy shirts) and interesting panels. During the first day of the conference Hans Roslings presentation - delivering some blunt remarks about both the French resistance towards Turkey joining EU as well as a warning about Paris becoming like Venice: a good place to tourist, but not a site for development and progress.

The Program Director of TED held a frighteningly good lecture about how the phenomenon we now refer to as “traditional media” in a wider perspective should be viewed as an exception to how media has worked in the history of humanity. Blogs and social media represent going back to the roots of human communication: conversations around the camp fire, having discussions and exchanging experiences. One-way media consumption, spearheaded by television, should be viewed as a transitional phase rather than the definition of media.

We also listened to a very informative panel about OpenSocial and where the social platform is heading. It was informative not in the sense that important information was relayed but in the sense that it made it clear that there is no important information to relay. Right now nobody knows how social networks are going to monetize their platforms, which means nobody is willing to let go of any asset that might become valuable.

Otherwise: a mixed bag. Some are obviously here to sell their dotcoms. But overall: a very positive impression of this conference. And the food is awesome.

This post was written by Anton

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

This post was written by Martin

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.

This post was written by Anton

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 post was written by Anton

Ekonominyheterna has launched Twingly Blogstream to open up to blog comments on their articles. They are the business and financial news from the Swedish TV-channel TV4 and the first business publication to join the Twinglysphere with Ekonominyheterna.se.

-We look forward to the blogger’s comments on our articles, says Ulf Skarin, Chief Editor at Ekonominyheterna.se. We think it is editorial interesting to connect traditional journalism with the enthusiasm and knowledge in the blogosphere.

In the Swedish blogosphere there are a lot of buzz about business issues, but there are not that many niched blogs about business and finance. We hope that Ekonominyheterna’s integration of Twingly can help to change that to stimulate even further discussions in the blogosphere on financial matters.

We welcome them to the Twinglysphere and hope that it should give them a good relation with the blogosphere to generate more traffic and interest in their news.

This post was written by Martin

The most influential blog in Denmark is the political blog Uriasposten according to the Twingly Report we release today of the Danish blogosphere.

Other blogs with great influence are Slagt en hellig ko and Hovedetpaabloggen.dk while the blog from the Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen who with great political influence only has the 45th most influential blog in Denmark.

The report is based on number of links from other Danish bloggers, which is a good way to measure the influence and interest within the blogosphere, and reflects posts from June 1 to August 27, 2007.

The report is published in conjunction with Cision, former Observer, who have formed a partnership with Primelabs to be able to offer analysis of the Danish blogosphere to their customers, in addition to traditional media analysis.

This post was written by Martin

Today the global successful TV-show Idol (the Swedish equivalent of American Idol) started using Twingly at the official website at TV4.se. They are using the Twingly widget to link back to the blogs that are linking to their articles. Idol in Sweden is just as popular as the show is in many other countries and is one of the biggest TV-shows at TV4 this fall.

This is the first time Twingly is used on a niche and trend sensitive website to connect with the latest in the blogosphere.

We welcome TV4 to the Twinglysphere and wish the best of luck to all new Idols!

This post was written by Martin