Twingly - the European blog search engine
With our expanding focus to other Nordic countries, we'd like to start the round by taking a look at a Swedish startup, whose founders I had a chance to meet last year in Paris' LeWeb3 - they're called Twingly.
Twingly is a blog search engine, similar to Technorati, but they claim it to be spam free. One of the ways this is achieved is a social rating to the blog posts in a similar fashion to Digg - the more popular the blog post, the higher it will rank in search results.
Twingly was launched in February 2007 and according to their history, Svd.se and DN.se, two of the largest Swedish newspapers began using their service Blogstream to link back to blogs writing about their articles. Since then, they have made deals with more than 40 European partners to begin using their Blogstream to link back to blogs. Finland's largest daily newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, is also using this feature at the bottom of their articles.
With a focus on creating cash flow and adding more partners to their business - there has been a slight underfocus on product development. Twingly's product line is composed of the Blogstream and a screensaver that visually displays the state of the blogosphere.
They aren't giving out too many statistics on where they are with regards to blogs pinging their service, but they are open in other ways. For example, they have opened up their Tech Plan to the public so that people can vote on what features and tools ought to be added in the future - crowdsourcing at its finest!
With regards to finances, I'm guessing Twingly is making a profit as their deals with the regular media houses aren't poorly priced. They also have 9 people to support with the tech, so the costs shouldn't be that high. Nevertheless, I'd hate to see them lose the entrepreneurial thrive if they do make a nice profit - they have a lot of potential around this idea as Technorati isn't all that common in Europe.
Hi! Thanks for a great article about us!
I promise you, we have a lot of ongoing projects in the product development field. If everything goes as we think right now, we launching a lot of cool things in the nearest months from now. Of course, we hope to sell more, but we're focused on developing new things all the time.
Please let me know if you wondering something.
Best regards
Anton Johansson, Twingly
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