Social Meme Tracking: Here Come the Swedes

The first time you might have heard of Twingly was back in early 2007 with the launch of the Twingly Screensaver. The screensaver was an interesting innovation. For those of you who have not heard of it, the screensaver features a constantly updated list of the titles of every single blog post that is written anywhere in the world. The list scrolls in real time and there are links to each blog post which provide the URL, the name of the blog, the author, and the first two lines of the post. While an interesting development, from a digital curation perspective, the general criticism lobbed against the screensaver was that it just wasn't "useful." The critique goes something like - what is a user going to do with so much raw, unfiltered data?

Since the screensaver, Twingly has actually been looking at making the blogosphere more accessible and searchable. The Twingly Blog Search and Twingly Micro-Blog Search have become wildly popular in Europe. Anecdotally, I've been trying to find a way to get an RSS feed for one of my favorite Middle East opinion columnists, Robert Fisk, who writes for The Independent. After failing to find a RSS feed for Fisk alone (without the other Independent columnists) using Google Blog Search, Technorati, and even the RSS page on the website of the Independent, I was able to do so using the Twingly Blog Search. How they managed to provide a RSS feed for something that the source website does not provide is beyond my comprehension, but good for them!

Probably the most interesting development that the folks at Twingly are working on is what they are calling a "social meme-tracker" by the name of Twingly Channels. The web-based application is still in a limited-release beta version (you'll need to find an invite code, try: ALTSEARCHENGINES), and while there are more than a few kinks that need to be ironed-out, the idea seems pretty revolutionary. Essentially, Twingly Channels provides a social network based around memes rather than individuals (as is done on Facebook and Twitter). Anyone can create a meme and name it whatever they want (from as general as "Entertainment" to as specific as a particular person, place, or thing). Other users can "subscribe" to this meme the way that one "follows" a person on Twitter. These users can add things that are relevant to that meme - blog posts, tweets, articles, etc. and all of the subscribes can comment on these posts and specify whether they "like" this particular post. The more subscribers like the post, the higher the post is on the stream.

The only major issue I see at the moment is that Twingly has yet to determine an adequate way of organizing these memes (or "channels") apart from a simple list which orders the channels according to their popularity. The implications for a tool like this are huge. One can easily envision scientists creating "channels" which are relevant to a particular topic and using this tool to quickly share data, and comment and rank it. Unfortunately, at the moment, most of the channels relate to things in Sweden (in fact most of the comments are in Swedish) so it's too early to see whether something like this is catching-on globally, but there is a lot that I like about meme-centered social networking as opposed to person-centered social networking.