If you have been following the Twingy blog during the past month, you have been reading about many of our different services and offerings. But there is on tool that we didn’t mentioned for a while, but that some of you might like: The Twingly Screensaver (Windows only).
We launched the Twingly Screensaver in early 2007 as a way to visualize the global blog activity in real time. After installing it you get a 24/7 stream of all blog activity, straight to your screen. By holding the left mouse button you can move the visualization of the earth to the region of your choice to see blog posts being published there right now. Click on one of the headlines to see a summary of it, and then either proceed to the source or continue to discover. Of course it helps if you are a language talent!
All the data shown in the Screensaver comes from our Blog Search and the stream is processed on Amazon’s Web Servers in order to keep up with the amount of new content.
Even though we see the Screensaver mostly as a fun project to present Twingly in an experimental and neat-looking way, we got some pretty sweet coverage when we launched a few years ago – a lot of international technology sites and blogs wrote about it, among others Valleywag, O’Reilly’s MAKE and Digital Inspiration. Even Twitter co-founder Biz Stone published our video showing the Twingly Screensaver in action.
The video itself has been watched almost 400.000 times by now, and some people having a look at it are probably not even aware that they can download the software from us to use it by themselves.
The Twingly Screensaver has also appeared in a lot of Screensaver Best-of-rankings, like this one by Smashing Magazine.
Looking back it is clear that the Screensaver was a good way to spread the word about Twingly, and it probably also helped that we presented it on conferences and events like the Future of Web Apps 2007 conference. There is simply nothing more beautiful than seeing the global blogosphere publishing content in real time right in front of your eye.
Get the Twingly Screensaver here if you want to try it yourself (and if you are on Windows).
Here is the video:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgIT-hfgOXY&w=480&h=390]