Launch of Twendly

Yesterday we launched http://twendly.com which is a Twitter people search implementing a version of the HiveMind engine we have been working on.

It's still very much a preview of the concept, but it does provide a hands on implementation that you can quickly experience to see the concept a lot more clearly.  There are lots of features we are working to add in, but for now this is the very core of the idea - you search for information and we return people.

Even if you don't have a Twitter account you can still search and play with it - you'll get the basics of the concept very quickly, but if you do have a Twitter account, we'd love you to sign up and let us index all your tweets to add more users into the database and make the demonstration more meaningful.  We'd love to get a couple of hundred people signed up over the Christmas period, so feel free to invite and encourage your friends to join in too.

What we aren't demonstrating here is the plug-out concept yet - we've implemented a Twitter plug-in, but we aren't returning the data yet.  In an Enterprise implementation (for example a Wiki) you'll be able to plug-in various different sources and then build and save Topic searches.  The results of the Topic searches (for example Lotus Connections Experts) will then be able to be assigned through plug-outs back to source data, for example labelling the top 20 individuals who match the Topic with the topic name (i.e. tagging them as "Lotus Connections Experts") in the source system.

We'd love to hear your feedback, so please let us know what you think using the feedback on the site.