Project Shinobi Archives - Twingly - Social Data with Passion

You are now able to create Channels at Twingly.com

July 1, 2010Twingly5 Comments

Starting from today, you are able to create open Channels at Twingly.com. Since you are a registered as a beta user, we would very much like to encourage you to try this out!

Twingly Channels is a social news reader. You can set up Channels for any topic you are interested in, and invite others to subscribe. The subscribers can post links into the Channel, or comment and vote on the content that come in from the blogs or news feeds you have inserted.

If you are interested in trying this out, click here to go to Create Channel

If you have lost your password you will be able to request a new one, or sign up if you haven’t done so already.

Again, what is Twingly Channels?
Twingly Channels is like a mix between Digg and Google Reader, where people help each other finding interesting news. By sorting news stories on the number of responses from social media and from users in your Channel, we help you to quickly find out what are the top stories every day.

Why should I become the creator of a Channel?
To create a Channel is somewhat similar to starting a blog, but you’re not writing any posts. Instead you add existing blogs and news feeds to the Channel that are highly relevant to a topic you and others are interested in. Top stories from all sources are then extracted so that your subscribers get the best news every day. You become the curator of that Channel, building a community of subscribers sharing a common interest.

Click here to go to Twingly.com >

This is Twingly Channels

September 2, 2009Twingly71 Comments

The realtime web is overwhelming us with information. Search is not social. RSS is a broken promise. Twingly Channels brings a revolution to these three areas.

A Twingly Channel acts as a social filter on top of feeds and realtime search, allowing you to set up a social memetracker for any topic or event. The underlying idea is that by aggregating feeds and realtime search results into a channel where many people sharing the same interest can discuss and vote on the content (while also providing a filter to solve the prevalent problem of information overflow) we lower the learning curve to the realtime web.

Twingly Channels provides instant user value without the user having to spend time finding the right people to follow. Following topics rather than individuals, you immediately tap into the collective intelligence of a group of people sharing your interests. Or you can create your own channel and invite others to assist you in picking feeds and keywords to monitor.

A Channel consists of two views. While the Incoming view shows the full stream, the Popular view is filtered using attention data from the realtime web and from users posting links, comments and likes.

Here’s a bundle of screenshots showing these examples of these two views (click to enlarge!):

One specific use of Twingly Channels will be to monitor all conversations around a brand, for internal use or to provide a social space for fans of the brand (click to enlarge!).

Not easily shown in a screenshot is the fact that everything in Twingly Channels is realtime: the incoming stream of new content, user comments and likes and the filtering into the memetracker view. We leverage our existing search engine for blogs and microblogs to bring new results into relevant channels based on the search terms channel owners have defined.

Some coverage on Twingly Channels so far:

Techcrunch:
Exclusive Screenshots Of Twingly Channels: A Personalized, Real-Time Memetracker

The Next Web:
Twingly Channels could be the FriendFeed beater we’ve been waiting for

UPDATED In German:

Netzwertig:
Gemeinsam gegen die Informationsüberflutung
Translated: United against the information overload

In Swedish:

Metro:
Twingly skapar ny mikrobloggtjänst

Ny Teknik:
Smartare sök när användarna hjälps åt
Translated: Smarter search when users help each other

DN.se:
Twingly från Linköping utmanar Google
Translated: Twingly from Linköping challenges Google

Anders Thoresson:
Twingly vill göra RSS-läsaren social
Translated: Twingly wants to make the RSS-reader social

Project Shinobi Takes Exciting First Baby Steps in Internal Pre-Alpha Release

July 18, 2009Twingly8 Comments

shinobi_by_julia
Project Shinobi is running on schedule, as proved by the milestone met this week to get to an internal pre-alpha release.

The first look at the current results of the project was met with cheers in the internal Skype chat we use for keeping the entire team in the loop when geographically dispersed. It is awe-inspiring to see the first step taken towards the public release on October 1st. Especially since the pre-alpha consists a proof-of-concept for the technically challenging parts of the project (pending stress-tests). It also provides the opportunity to evaluate the usability concepts we have been developing step by step during the past one and a half years.

Here is a snippet from our internal Skype chat (in Swedish), to provide some insight into how the pre-alpha release was recieved internally. Needless to say, we’re pretty excited about this project!

Skype chat
shinobichat

Image credit for the artwork at the top goes to Julia Källström, my three year old daughter, who earlier this summer entirely by coincidence was drawing figures looking suspiciously much like ninjas.