Twingly Blog

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

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.

This post was written by Anton

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.

This post was written by Anton

IDG in Sweden is the latest addition to the Twinglysphere, using Twingly Blogstream to link back to the blogs that are linking to their articles. IDG publishes more than 300 magazines and newspapers in 85 countries.

They are also the first site to use the new widget technology which is very easy to integrate and manage. A widget is just a piece of HTML-code that is added to a page template which is a swift way to get new functionality on a website. By using Twingly Blogstream as a widget, there is no need for any extra coding, just copy and paste. This makes it possible for any website to use Twingly within only a couple of hours.

IDG will not only use Twingly on IDG.se but on all of their publication’s websites in Sweden, as Internetworld, Cap & Design etc. Other publications using Twingly are for instance the two major Swedish morning dailies Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet.

This post was written by Martin

Twingly Report Sweden that is released today shows that the humorous blog Tjuvlyssnat.se is the most linked blog in Sweden. The Report also reveals some previous unknown facts about the blogosphere. The purpose of the Report is to share knowledge and generate interest in the blogosphere. The Report is available at www.primelabs.se/twingly (only in Swedish though), where you also find the data that the Report is based on.

We have analyzed how blogs are linking to each other and what they write about. We have within several categories measured the influence the blogs have and can therefore present the most influential blog in each category. Interesting to see is that current Swedish Minister for Foreign Affairs Carl Bildt does not only have great influential in political issues in Sweden, but has also the most influential political blog in the Swedish blogosphere.

We have also covered what people are blogging about and it reveals that Swedish bloggers love the spring, life and food, but hates funerals, snow and school.

Blogs have in a short while become an important medium with for instance great influence of the political scene. Up until now there hasn’t been that much knowledge available about the blogosphere. But with our blog search engine Twingly we can basically extract any kind of data from the blogosphere. What would you like to know about your blogosphere?

This post was written by Martin