Digg + FriendFeed = Twingly Channels: Try it now (Invites)

If you haven’t managed to get yourself a Google Wave invite, here’s something to ease your pain.

After teasing us for months with what they were calling ‘Project Shinobi‘, Twingly has finally taken its new Twingly Channels service live.

The service is like a real-time combination of FriendFeed’s content sharing and discovery, Digg’s voting system and Tweetmeme’s retweet tracking, creating an exciting realtime way of discussing what’s interesting right now.

Twingly Channels is based on the idea of, funnily enough, Channels of information. A channel can be set up to import RSS feeds and searches of the web, Twitter and other social sources. If you subscribe to the ‘Entertainment’ channel, for example, you’ll find it will serve you entertainment related news in real-time in the ‘Incoming’ view.

As with FriendFeed, items can be ‘Liked’ and commented upon. Items with the most likes, comments and retweets show up at the top of the ‘Popular’ view. This is where it’s more like Digg, with popular (and hopefully the most interesting) content rising to the top. Where content appears in more than one channel, comments and likes are shared globally across the service, although an option to make a channel and its activity private is in the works.

Upon signing up you’ll be subscribed to The Next Web channel. This is a great place to discuss posts from The Next Web and other related content, but there is a small selection of other channels to choose from, including a general one for tech news. The number of channels will grow over time.

Eventually users will be able to create their own channels, choosing what RSS feeds and searches build the content. Twingly is holding off on launching this feature as when the development team were testing the service they found the all set up their own channels. Better, the thinking goes, to have a few channels with lots of activity than many channels with little going on in them.

If you would like to try out the service sign up at twingly.com with the Beta Code THENEXTWEB