Twingly – Social Data with Passion

Unfolding a series of events that astonished scientists worldwide, Twingly today announces that it has been a key figure in researching and aquiring a new kind of technology that will allow Twitter to pass Tweets between their users slightly before they are actually written.

As previously announced, this week the Large Hadron Collider had it’s first scientific breakthrough, producing a record-breaking high energy collision between quantum particles. What is lesser known is that it was no coincidence that Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter, celebrated his birthday this week as well. And that the LHC experiment had side-effects of monumental proportions.

From the high-energy collision, the LHC opened what scientists call a “worm-hole” into the future, where information can pass through. Thanks to Twingly, this worm-hole is now busy at work inside Twitters server farm, receiving tweets from the future which are then sent out to users, just slightly ahead of time.

Twingly have had great success with their Twingly Live service during 2010. Their focus on break-through realtime technology is starting to pay off.

“The realtime web allows people to put more and more of their everyday conversations on to the net”, says Martin Källström, CEO of Twingly. “With the super-realtime technology we helped Twitter integrate, these conversations will now go even faster. Tweets are simply coming from slightly into the future.”

Professor Franz Mannheimer von Trüttfigger Kohlman-Grant, Chief Scientist-guy of the LHC project at CERN, Geneva, said this about Twitter:

Evan Williams was a genius when he designed Twitter to only allow messages of up to 140 characters. It turns out, that this is exactly how much information that according to the laws of quantum physics are allowed to pass through a worm-hole. It is as if Twitter was designed with future-time in mind, not real-time.

Asked what Twingly’s contribution to the worm-hole project exactly consists of, Professor Franz Mannheimer von Trüttfigger Kohlman-Grant answered:

Ich weise sämtliche Anschuldigungen zurück, dass irgendeine Form von Bestechung im Spiel war als Twingly die Wurmloch-Technologie für Twitter erworben hat. Ich würde niemals Bestechungsgelder annehmen, schon gar nicht von Ausländern. Dennoch möchte ich gerne festhalten, dass Martin Källström und Evan Williams wohl die nettesten Menschen überhaupt auf dieser Welt sind. Letztes Wochenende haben wir wie verrückt zusammen gefeiert und sind nun das, was man bei uns in Deutschland Stammtischbrüder nennt. Und die blonden schwedischen Zwillinge, die später in mein Apartment kamen haben wir wirklich verdammt gut gefallen. Ich habe mich entschieden, sie zu behalten und baue nun eigens einen speziellen Keller für sie. Aber wie gesagt, keine Bestechung in irgendeiner Weise ist involviert. Ach ja, hat jemand irgendwo meinen neuen diamantbesetzten pre-release Apple iPad gesehen?

Which roughly translates to:

All I can say is that Martin Källström and Evan Williams are probably the nicest guys on the planet.

The physical limit of sending 140 characters through a wormhole this also has spurred other scientific research projects: How much information can you actually fit into 140 characters? The question arises from the need to sometimes actually communicating more complex information than can fit into 140 characters. Surprisingly, this boils down to finding out which Unicode ranges that are acknowledged by the Universe. The scientists are referring to the research under the name String Theory. Albert Einstein is famously known to deny the existance of String Theory, uttering the often-quoted phrase “God does not do UTF-8”.

Martin Källström, CEO of Twingly, was also asked what the actual implications are for the end user when Tweets now are being published from slightly into the future. He answered:

“There will actually be very little impact on end-user experience. Tweets are now being published from 8 nanoseconds into the future, which is the amount of time it takes for light to travel 140 characters. This is a too small amount of time to be noticeable. But it just feels different.”

Video from the LHC announcement:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isUQfJ0fMDk]