Finding Experts on Twitter Just Got Easy with Twendly

Twendly, a new expertise search engine, has launched making it easier than ever to find subject matter experts to follow on Twitter.

Twendly is different to both Google Search and Twitter Search in a couple of ways.

Let me explain (with the help of some images):—

A Google search on “SQL” returns the best documents and/or sites to visit to find out more on SQL.

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A Twitter search on “SQL” returns tweets showing who’s talking about SQL right now.

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A Twendly search on “SQL” returns results showing you who has been speaking about SQL the most, on Twitter, over the past 12 months and how often they’ve been speaking about it.

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The theory here is that people who speak about something more often probably have some degree of skill/expertise in that area.

Before anyone gets started, I’m sure this isn’t a hard and fast rule and that there are exceptions, but as a general rule it makes sense.

Also, I’m sure there are other use-cases for the site – e.g. finding out who your biggest fans are – but in the couple of days I’ve been playing with it I’ve found it super useful as a tool for finding people on twitter who have some expertise about a topic I’m interested in. Build those people into a Twitter list and Bam! instant expertise streams.

Twendly was created by the team at BinaryPlex, the same people who created HiveMind, an expertise search engine I wrote about not long ago.

Co-Founder Tim Bull explains why they created Twendly:

We’ve launched this as an open demonstration of our underlying HiveMind engine indexing Twitter users and allowing people to perform searches for the things that people tweet about.

There are only 120K Twitter users indexed at the moment (something we plan to rectify soon when we’ll start to crawl and index more aggressively), but the results are already proving interesting.

He also detailed how the site is going and where they plan to get it:

We are getting very consistent search traffic on Twendly at the moment and it seems people are finding it a useful tool to identify Twitter users they should follow.  From an Enterprise perspective, we now have a credible live story around indexing 120K Users and over 118M records already.  We are targeting growing this to 1M users and 1Bn records to see how Twendly evolves with more data and to actively demonstrate our capability to scale.

It’s a simple, yet incredibly powerful idea and one that has proven to be unbelievably useful in helping me find people with expertise I want to tap into.

This is definitely one to check out