BinaryPlex - People Centric Software
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We are building a social media analytics tool to turn social media monitoring into social media action. We go beyond mentions to let you Explore, Discover and Engage with the tribes talking about your brand.

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Shutting Twendly down - for now

Flickr: Racy Rachel

As the Twendly website now says:

Twendly is closed (3rd Apr 2010) - but we'll be back!

We built Twendly to demonstrate the concept of a people centric search engine for Twitter, and thanks to your support, it's been very successful.

Unfortunately due to the limitations of the current engine technology and increasing data volumes it was becoming unstable.

We've taken the decision to shut Twendly down to allow us more time to focus on launching Tribalytic, our new Twitter Analytics product which uses a brand new, more scalable engine. Once Tribalytic has launched, our current plan is to re-launch Twendly using this new engine, which will give a faster and more reliable experience.

If you'd like to know more about Tribalytic or further information on Twendly, please sign up on the mailing list below. We promise we won't spam you - we're too hard at work to have the time anyway even if we wanted to (which of course we don't - we hate spam!).

Thanks for your support, Tim and Alex

While sad for us, we do see this as a positive step for our business because it means our core product is a significant step closer to launch.

To provide a little bit more background.

Twendly used a prototype engine similar in function, but not in technology or design, to the engine we are building for Tribalytic.

As we approach a launch of Tribalytic, it's clear that the new engine requires some dedicated resources to perform at it's best.  Given we are an early stage start-up, we've decided to use the servers dedicated to Twendly for Tribalytic instead, largely because Tribalytic will be a chargeable product and so has priority for our business.

The positive news is that the engine we've developed for Tribalytic delivers the same core features as Twendly (but much faster and a much more scalable way) as well as many other features (location based search anyone?).  

Once Tribalytic has been launched and is stable, our current plan is to reintroduce Twendly using the same underlying data, enabling us to once more provide a generic people centric search for Twitter while not having to "double up" on our resources.

We really are proud of Twendly and what it's achieved, but unfortunately we couldn't justify the expense in both hardware and time at this point to keep it running.

The Twendly site (http://twendly.com) has a sign up for a mailing list if you'd like to be notified of a relaunch or to find out more about Tribalytic.

Thanks

Tim and Alex

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Filed under  //  tribalytic   twendly  
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Posted 3 months ago by Tim Bull 

Farewell HiveMind, Introducing Tribalytic

It's been far too long since we've updated you on what we are up to.  Time to rectify that!  Those that follow Tim on his blog will probably be more up to date, but it's time to let BinaryPlex followers know what's been happening and where we are at.

Like all startups we have our ups and downs and the last few weeks have been no exception.  For the price of entry it's proving to be an interesting ride.

When we formed, our initial goal was to build software to search and locate experts inside large enterprises.   As we started discussing this problem with people who had signed up for our beta we started to see some consistent challenges:

  1. There was incredible diversity in the response to the problem - people had clear views on what it would take to address the challenge, what content should be mined and how structured and unstructured content should combine.  We struggled to find enough consistency to identify which part of the product we would build that could appeal to more than one or two customers at a time, particularly in the beginning.
  2. There was insufficient pull - lots of people were interested, a few were engaged, but generally speaking, the problem was looking like a nice-to-have, not a must-have.  With the economy where it's at in the US and the UK, we decided it wasn't (if it ever is) a great time to launch a "nice to have" business.
  3. There was generally speaking an expectation that it would be a "point and click" type experience.  The reality of course is that the technology required is a fairly complex installation and required some substantive resources both in hardware and time for any meaningful implementation.  We could also see that there were barriers of entry around enterprise technology choices (must run on <<insert technology choice of preference here>>) that were going to be difficult to overcome - our resources were directed at solving the problem in the most efficient way possible (which for us meant Linux and lots of open source), not catering to Enterprise requirements on technology platforms.
Rather than simply drive for the market, we really began to question what sort of organisation did we want to be and what did we want to do?  Some things were clear - with limited resources we need a single point of focus, we wanted something clients could experience quickly and easily and we wanted to develop in the technologies that were best suited for the task.  Finally we couldn't let go of the work we'd been doing with the HiveMind engine - the challenge of finding and understanding people was just too interesting.

With these thoughts in mind we launched Twendly.com to help address point two - let people feel and touch what we were doing.  People really responded and engaged with Twendly far beyond potential HiveMind customers and we have seen sufficient traction that we believe there is a market interested and ready for a solution in this space.  We also realised that a SaaS model would help us address number three listed above.

We took this early prototype, our market research and our response to Twendly to Sydney and started pitching to Angels and VCs.  These are smart people who've been around and throwing ourselves into the deep end helped us learn and iterate very quickly across a week to really focus our idea onto a market with a big enough problem that we could address and help address point one.

Which brings us to today.  We've made the tough decision to farewell HiveMind and instead introduce Tribalytic, a social media analytics tool that shares a lot of common heritage with the work done for HiveMind.

Using the technology developed for HiveMind, Tribalytic goes beyond a simple monitoring of mentions and instead deliver fast analysis and segmentation to help products and brands Explore, Discover and Engage with the tribes holding conversations about them.

While we regret that we won't be delivering HiveMind, we are very excited about Tribalytic and this new focus has helped us drive more rapidly towards a product which we anticipate should be in beta by early April.  If you want to go beyond simply knowing that 300 people tweeted about your brand yesterday and actually start to understand more about who these people are, what drives them and interests them, we invite you to visit us at BinaryPlex and sign up for the Tribalytic mailing list.

* Rollercoaster image by Scott Ableman,licensed under Creative Commons.

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Filed under  //  hivemind   progress   rollercoaster   tribalytic   twendly  
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Posted 5 months ago by Tim Bull