Twingly: Revised Blog Search + Awesome Screensaver

So you are into reading blogs, right? You probably have RSS subscriptions in your favorite reader, ocassionally you also like to search a blog or two. Or you might be using Technorati. Ever heard of Twingly? Twingly is a new blog search engine. Ah.. another one, you may say. However, Twingly sets itself apart from the rest.

As for the search, Twingly claims to offer spam free search. It manages to do so by showing results from a blog that has link from ‘high quality sites/blogs’. In addition to this, it boasts of the following features:

• Social search. The users can enhance the search results by voting on posts they like. Bloggers enhance the search results by linking to posts they like
• Subscribe to search results by RSS and alerts via email
• Language functionality: Translation of search results and filtering based on language
• Twingly widget platform. Parts of Twingly.com can be incorporated into blogs
• Hot Right Now. Overview on hot topics in the blogosphere
• User directed development through a tech plan open for voting.

As for my experience? The interface is great (far better than the cluttered Technorati interface), search results seem fine (not anything striking) but that’s may be because their search is more Europe centric. A search for "techcrazy" gave my blog as the first result in Google Web Search and Google Blog Search and gave one of my MakeUseOf article as the first result in Twingly.

However this ain’t all the cool part yet. The real cool stuff is a "screensaver". So what’s so cool about the screensaver? Well according to the site:

“Twingly screensaver is visualizing the global blog activity in real time. Forget RSS readers where you see only what you’re interested in. With Twingly screensaver you get a 24/7 stream of all (viewer discretion advised) blog activity, straight to your screen.

As you can see it lets you view the happenings of the blogosphere in real time. The screensaver displays a globe and stories from around the world keep scrolling on the left hand side of the screen in real time (well.. almost) with a line connecting the title of the story, to the location of its origin. And all this while the globe keeps spinning. Anyways why am I using words? Have a look (A picture is worth thousand words, what is a video worth? Anyone?) :

So as you must have noticed, you can actually click on a ’scrolling by’ story that you like and a short summary of the story will appear on the right hand site of the screen.

You can press "i" to enter the interactive mode which allows you to rotate and zoom on the globe somewhat like Google Earth. You can spin to location of you choice and see what stories are coming out from ‘that part of the world’.

Overall the screensaver is great, the milisecond clock and the ever updating story count, the rotating globe, the scrolling stories give it a great sci-fi / advanced look.

Have you tried twingly? what are your thoughts? And how do you like the screensaver?

Filed Under: Cool Software Apps ¦ Cool Websites
Tags: blog search, blogging tools, live, RSS, screensaver