A cup of coffee gives us 4000 blogs - 2015 in review - Twingly

Yet another year has passed for Twingly. For us this is a natural time to sit back and reflect on what we have done during 2015.

Most of our continuous efforts are done behind the scenes so we’d like to take this opportunity to share some statistics for you to get an idea of what we do to deliver a great service.

2015 statistics

Twingly is a complex system (machines and humans) that continuously finds new blogs, index the posts and deliver data both to our API customers as well as to our public search and widgets. We work on lots of projects to achieve our goals and last year we created 24 new internal projects, we have almost a hundred projects in total.

Out of the 24 projects 7 were published with an open source license. For example, https://github.com/twingly/ecco which is used to replicate the blog data from our MySQL servers to the search indices. All open source projects are available at https://github.com/twingly.

Some other statistics from the previous year:

2634 cups of coffee brewed in the office
7717 code commits, 86 397 lines added and 86 706 lines removed
1228 issues created in our bug/feature tracking system (845 closed and 383 still open)
835 support tickets handled

Not everything has gone as planned though, we’ve had 28 infrastructure issues that required extra work to keep the service up and running. Thanks to our great employees only some of the incidents affected our users and all service interruptions got noted on status.twingly.com to help our customers understand what’s going on. Each incident is a great opportunity to better understand our system and improve our services and skills.

Our machines worked hard as well:

2016-01-05 10.52.48-1 — A few of our hard working servers

Received 1 020 088 312 XML-RPC pings
Fetched 66.75 TiB from the Internet
39.81 TiB served from our servers
14.22 TiB content served from our CDN
Analyzed 1 084 123 550 tweets, looking for blogs

The result of the combined human and machine effort resulted in:

Indexed 407 859 721 blog posts
Discovered 10 336 602 new blogs (almost 4000 blogs per cup of coffee in the office)
99.91% uptime, average for all our public services. Our API uptime is available on status.twingly.com

Christmas statistics

We took some well-deserved time off around Christmas. Once back at the office we noticed the annual Swedish blog decline for the Christmas weekend. In Sweden it’s most common to celebrate on Christmas Eve (December 24). Most bloggers also took the day off and the post graph for Swedish got a noticeable dip.

Screen Shot 2016-01-19 at 14.15.28 emoji.png — Swedish Christmas Celebration on December 24

29.42% of the Swedish posts on Christmas eve had common Christmas keywords in their title (Jul = Christmas, God = Merry and Julafton = Christmas eve).

Thanks for a great 2015!

We are really proud of what we accomplished in 2015 and are eager to evolve our services during 2016.

Bonus links to our previous reviews:

Twingly – Social Data with Passion