Happy New Year to all of you! We hope that you are as excited as we to see what 2012 will have in store. If the upcoming next months will only be half as eventful as 2011, there really won’t be a shortage of news! Let’s do a quick recap about what happened during the past year at and around Twingly.
January
We started the year with preparations of all the good things to come, with introducing a few websites within the public service and public sector that use Twingly as well as with a comprehensive overview about media monitoring companies from around the world that have partnered up with us (part 1, part 2).
February
We were happy to announce CisionWire as new Twingly partner. We also launched a new version of Twingly Channels that focused on group communication and microblogging. And journalisten.no, a Norwegian website covering the media industry, described how blogs have gained power in Sweden, mentioning Twingly as one of the reasons that supported this development.
March
Two trainees started to work at the Twingly office in Linköping, Charlotta Baltazar and Peter Lindblom. It was great to have both aboard during the two month they were staying with us. Meanwhile here in the blog, we published interviews showing how much e-commerce sites can benefit from the Twingly solutions.
April
Since April, the two largest e-commerce sites for books in Sweden, Adlibris and Bokus, are using Twingly Blogstream on their websites. It was great to see that kind of connection between the blogosphere and booksphere – and it still is! Another thing that made us happy were the great articles about Twingly by Thomas Dahlquist, Internetworld Sweden and The Next Web. And for all conference goers we posted this handy list of major tech and social media events in Europe.
May
As every year in May, we celebrated our birthday. This time it was the 5th – for an Internet startup that’s a very special number, which we honoured with an amazing party. Check out the photos here. We also traveled to the Next conference in Berlin, Europe’s new startup hotspot.
June
Beauty Planet, a leading Swedish online store for perfume, makeup, skin care and hair care, launched its Twingly integration, and we gave an overview about the APIs Twingly offers to media monitoring businesses.
July
We co-organized the TEDxAlmedalen 2011 event at the Swedish island of Gotland. Twingly was also part of the jury for the “Almedalens blogger of the year” award. Lena Lid Falkman won the price for her blog coverage of Almedalen Week, an important forum in Swedish politics.
August
For the third year in a row, we sponsored the Sweden Social Web Camp unconference and attended the popular event to mingle, discuss and be inspired. Meanwhile, the Swedish business website affarsliv.com published an interview with Twingly CEO Martin Källström, and we highlighted the top 7 most beautiful integrations of Twingly Blogstream.
September
The number of Twingly partners grew again by 3, and with the Cathedral of Lund we could welcome the first church to the Twingly family. Apart from that, we released a ranking (in Swedish) listing the 10 Swedish publishing houses that are getting the most links from bloggers.
October
At least in Sweden, the mobile app of the year 2011 was the Wordfeud, a scrabble-like game for iOS and Android. To help Wordfeud addicts to win and to animate them to donate some money to Doctors without Borders, we launched a little web app called Wordfeusk. And while Wordfeusk was hit by a lot of traffic, two members of the Twingly team attended conferences in October: Anja was at the Research & Results in Munich and Kristoffer went to London to visit the FOWA conference. You can read about his experience here.
November
November was a big month: We rolled out a new front page, launched Twingly Insight – blog analytics for professionals as well as a Wiki for German Social Media Monitoring Tools and announced that we together with Greenhill Relations will hold courses on how to do a blog analysis. We also supported Pay a Blogger day on November 29th and got some love by the SIME conference in Stockholm that used Twingly Live during the event. Media attention wasn’t bad either, with among others dagensmedia.se and feber.se covering our news. Also in November, Twingly was chosen by Internetworld as one of Sweden’s 100 best websites. And our partner Halens even won the prize as Sweden’s best website!
December
The time before Christmas is the best to do something good for others that are in need, which is why we encouraged you to help UNICEF help children around the world. We also welcomed another e-commerce partner (Ginza) and introduced you to two Swedish municipalities that connect to the blogosphere via Twingly. Last but not least, we announced that we acquired Bloggportalen.se from Aftonbladet, one of the largest newspaper brands in the Nordic region.
Thank you for a great year!