Archive of thenextweb.com
Written on 11th June 2009
0 COMMENTS 
Martin Bryant, Co-founder, Social Media Café Manchester
Swedish startup Twingly has today hinted that something big, possibly involving ninjas, is coming from the company soon.
Twingly has been offering a blog trackback service since early 2007 and more recently launched a blog searching tool that compares favourably to its better known rivals, Google Blog Search and Technorati. Now the company has announced ‘Project Shinobi’, a mysterious product that they claim “will become the next great platform for social media”.
Taking its name from a 1980s Sega videogame about ninjas, Project Shinobi appears to be some kind of real-time social news aggregation tool. In a vague blog post today, CEO Martin Källström writes:
“On October 1st, 2009, Twingly will join the ranks of web services working together to improve your experience of social and traditional media. With Project Shinobi, we are aiming to provide a more social, more relevant and more realtime experience, integrating with the services you already use. Not only for people that are early adopters of social media, but accessible and immediately valuable for anyone.”
Realtime social aggregation first hit its stride with April’s relaunch of FriendFeed as a non-stop ‘waterfall’ of shared content and discussion. With its highly configurable interface, system of Groups for specific topics and the ability to use the service via IM and email, FriendFeed has become an incredibly useful tool for earl-adopters. However, mainstream use still eludes it and if Twingly are aiming at a wide audience from the start, Project Shinobi could be the product that takes real-time to the masses.
Of course, the web world is a fickle one and it may not turn out that way. Still, as grand statements of intent go Project Shinobi is going to be an interesting one to follow.
Swedish startup Twingly has today hinted that something big, possibly involving ninjas, is coming from the company soon.
Twingly has been offering a blog trackback service since early 2007 and more recently launched a blog searching tool that compares favourably to its better known rivals, Google Blog Search and Technorati.
Now the company has announced ‘Project Shinobi’, a mysterious product that they claim “will become the next great platform for social media”.
(more…)
Written on 26th January 2009
10 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
I’ve warned you two weeks ago. An avalanche of new Swedish start-ups made it to the web. Last weekend, 90 Swedish Internet entrepreneurs combined forces for 24 hours to produce 52 new web services during the 24 Hour Business Camp. Well, they succeeded. And now it’s up to us to choose a winner.
The choice is very diverse. You can vote for an interactive website where you can share your best children quotes and turn them into books, t-shirts and gifts. Or do you prefer a crowdsourced t-shirt shop that only delivers limited edition collections? If you’re looking for a job close to home, then head to Jobbkartan.se (”the job map”). It’s a search engine that lets you search for jobs based on their geographical location.
Listentoblogs.com
I’m still in doubt which brand-new start-up will get my votes. There’s Listentoblogs.com, a service build by the guys behind SoundCloud. On this well-designed site, you can listen to your favorite blogs, or turn any blog into a podcast using your own voice. Listentoblogs.com is well-designed and based on open standards like AppEngine, SoundCloud, and Twingly.
Veronica Maggio
On the other hand, YouTV.se introduced me to Veronica Maggio – a drop dead gorgeous Swedish pop star. Her video is featured in The Forfest Channel. Me discovering her is exactly what the founders wanted, as they want to bring back the laid back and random way of watching television. But then on the interwebs. Also pretty cool.
Check the other nominees here and cast your five votes.
KillerStartUps.com, are you paying attention? You’ve got a lot of reviewing to do.
Written on 20th January 2009
9 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Twitter Search is great, especially when you know the tricks. But what if you happened to live in a country where another microblogging service also has a large following. Most readers from Scandinavian countries will recognize this, since Jaiku is still pretty big there. You don’t want to execute those complicated search queries on multiple search engines. Allround Swedish blog company Twingly launched a solution last night.
With their brand new search engine, you can search updates in Twitter, Jaiku, Identi.ca, Bleeper.de (German), Bloggy.se (Swedish) and the archives of long gone Pownce. “It’s therefore”, Twingly’s Anton Johansson writes, “we call it the first federated microblog search because our goal is to indexing all microblogs from all services”.
The engine experienced some slow downs right after their launch, but is working fine now. I love the clean design and the subtle logos of the different microblogging services. Here’s how it looks like when you have results from three different services:
For those who have an instant “Where’s FriendFeed?!” reflex, the integration is on its way.
Written on 17th December 2008
7 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Twingly launched a new blog ranking tool yesterday. In a very modest way, the gentlemen from Sweden explain what’s it all about: “It’s like Google’s PageRank but only for blogs.” Plus, there’s a local touch, based on language. The largest blogs in Swedish gets BlogRank 10, the largest in Dutch get BlogRank 10 and the largest in English get BlogRank 10.
This new blog rank serves as the basis for a take on Technorati’s Top 100. Yes, Twingly is launching 12 different top 100 blogs lists (Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish). Anton Johansson: ” [This] makes it more fun for bloggers. It’s more cool to be a top notch Swedish blog and having a way to show it than to be no 7362 international.”
Twingly got mixed reactions. TechCrunch’s Robin Wauters celebrates his blog’s top position, Duncan Riley is pretty pissed off. We’re not happy either, but that’s our own fault. We’re too vain. We wanted that dot com domain. Thus we ditched TheNextWeb.org. Here’s the result:
What do you get when adding both results up? 10? We’ve the same problem at Technorati, check the results for the .com (authority 228) here, and the .org (authority 1087) here. Bear with us for a few months. After that you can tell anybody you’ve been a loyal reader of a Top 100 blog, even when they weren’t that famous yet.
Written on 11th June 2008
3 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Swedish start-up Twingly sent out an email yesterday to its 3000 private beta testers that their blog search engine goes live on Thursday. This is not just an engine in the line of Google Blogsearch or Technorati, since it offers spam-free results. Every blogger can ping the service, but the people behind Twingly only select the high-quality ones. The engine also has a 3.0 touch to it, as users can ‘like’ posts – which will affect the search results positively.
It doesn’t stop here though, as CEO Martin Källström and his team want to use their search engine as the basis for developing “kick-ass products”. A fine example is the Twingly Blogstream, a service that aimes to connect mainstream media with bloggers. This objective is close to my heart, as I believe that the majority of media consumers miss out on all the blog fun.
Connecting mainstream and blogs
Right now, Twingly offers a related blogposts widget to fourteen newspapers from all over Europe and one from South-Africa. On top of that, a bunch of Swedish magazines use the services of Twingly. So when a reader of these publications reads an article about the weak dollar, Twingly also suggests some posts from the blogosphere covering the same topic. This is a subtle and valuable way of introducing people to that oh so special world of blogs as the content is really relevant to them.
From a search engine to fun apps
To prove that the blogosphere really is a special world, Twingly has also developed a fun product: the Twingly Screensaver. This program shows a fancy visual representation of the state of the blogosphere, which looks like this:
First we conquer Europe
I think products like this spectacular screensaver are developed to let Twingly go viral. I’m pretty sure the guys from Twingly won’t deny this, as they tend not to hide their ambitions. Their eventual goal is “nothing short of world dominance”. In order to reach that, Twingly is currently focusing its efforts on European blogs. Smart move, as it will be hard enough to get engines like Blogsearch and Technorati out of people’s minds. When they’ve charmed Europe with their fun apps, spam free results, and a clear promise that they’re specifically focusing on this continent, the Swedes will probably head for the United States. This tactic might pay off, as Twingly really creates an unique blog experience.
Written on 5th April 2008
11 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Thanks for your great feedback yesterday! I’m really glad to hear that you guys had a good time and were inspired by the speakers and other attendees. Like I said yesterday, this blog will continue to report on European Web 2.0 news. Yet before we continue, I’d like to give you an overview of the posts we’ve written the last couple of days. So you can sit back, relax and relive the conference.
Keynotes
Adeo Ressi knows how to get funding
Gil Penchina: “Give your customers insane levels of control”
Khris Loux “Bloggers and startups, challenge the big companies and embrace open standards”
Leah Culver and the magical unicorn: A Pownce story
Nova Spivack: “The Semantic Web as an open and less evil web”
Robert Scoble about social media: “The first experience is a crappy experience”
Werner Vogels: “Everything fails all the time”
Garrett Camp: “one-size-fits-all in search is history”
Jessicah Mah: “Recommendations are crap!”
On the couch interviews
Kevin Rose: ‘Digg will soon start suggesting stories’ (this one made it to the Digg frontpage!)
Khris Loux interviews Chris Saad about Dataportability
Interviews by David – the man with the kilt – Petherick
Robert Scoble
Werner Vogels
Start-up rounds
1: CoComment, eBuddy, fav.or.it, Wauw, IntroNiche and Empressr
2: Netlog, Webnode, Lookery, Zilok, Radionomy and Wakoopa
3: Bemba, Backbase, andUNite, Twingly, Ubervu, ConfNetwork and a ‘warm body’
4: Symbaloo, Beezbox, Goojet, Hoera, Soocial, Locle and David Hasselhof
Media
1339 Flickr photos tagged with ‘thenextweb2008′
213 blog posts tagged with ‘thenextweb2008′
YouTube videos
Written on 23rd January 2008
1 COMMENT
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
“Yahoo hasn’t given up on search yet”
Yahoo, maybe in an effort to distract us from the massive layoffs coming up next week, has just announced that they have updated their crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms. In case you didn’t know, Yahoo hasn’t given up on search yet and has a decent search engine itself. The update is taking some time which means that we may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index. So far, nobody is complaining yet.
“most of these names are completely unfamiliar”
And then there are all the other Google alternatives that have news. Russian based Quintura was recently named named the Alternative Search Engine of the Year by AltSearchEngines.com. The interesting thing about this list is that most of these names are completely unknown to most of us. Here is a list of 100 search engines who work day and night to become the Google Killer but they can’t seem to make an impression. As the author of the article mentions “At the beginning of 2007, the five major search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL and Ask) had at least 95% of the search “pie” (it could be as much as 98.3%). At the end of 2007, the same five major search engines, with slight individual changes, still had at least 95% of the search “pie.””. So, as expected, search is a damn hard market to enter.
Techcrunch reports about Twingly, a Swedish company launching in a month or two, which will focus solely on european blog search. I have met the founders of Twingly at Le Web last year and we will do a more detailed interview with them once they actually launch and there is news to report.
“Google lost a whopping $40 Billion in market cap”
Oh, and entering the search market is damn hard but staying there can be tough too. Google lost a whopping $40 Billion in market cap since its stock reached a $747 high in early November. Today it lost another $37.95 (or 6.49%) and is currently hovering around $540. I guess being the number one search engine in the world isn’t all peaches and cream either.
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
