What next for Twendly

What a week it's been!

Twendly has grown and grown after TheNextWebAU article was published, sparking a wave of interest across the globe which has been fantastic. We've also seen something in the order of around 500 retweets about Twendly as people share the news.

Our initial suspicion that there was something useful about this way of searching for people, has now been have been confirmed by lots of enthusiastic people.

So where to from here? There are a few things that we are focussing on now in the short term:

We've decided to put the enterprise version of HiveMind aside. Twendly needs our full attention to realise its potential and we have lots of great ideas we want to build into it.
We've expanded our server capacity - as the search load increased, we've run into trouble both keeping the search up AND also loading and indexing the data to expand the search without dramatically impacting the search experience. A second server will help. This should come on line this weekend and will enable us to index new users much faster while still keeping the search experience for existing users running well.
Catching up! We experienced a massive surge in growth that we were not properly prepared for - we are working hard to get all these new sign ups into the index and deliver the experience we have promised.
Squashing Spam. We have had an anti-spam component to the engine from day one, but we have refined it a lot over the last week as we get more and more accounts indexed. Roughly 10% of accounts the we index, we consider spam and we remove from our search results. Our ultimate goal is that when you search you will find a real person, not a bot or a person who tweets like a bot.

You should start experiencing the benefits of these changes by next week.

In the medium term, we want to re-write the search engine from scratch and include more sophisticated algorithms for people matching. Twendly works quite well at the moment based on the feedback, but we know that it can be a lot better and for us to continue to scale we will need a different underlying architecture for the engine.

Thanks to everybody who has tried Twendly for your enthusiasm, your tweets and your blog posts - we are excited about the tool we are building and are looking forward to seeing what we can turn this into with our 100% focus and your support.

Cheers,

Tim Bull (@timbull) and Alex Dong (@alexdong)
Co-Founders of BinaryPlex (@binaryplex