A Swedish based company that leverages the blogosphere for content syndication with mainstream media. That would have been my description of Twingly a week ago. Today, I discovered they have plans to roll out a social blog search engine. An interesting development. Could Twingly have plans to become the next Technorati?

The past year has been a struggle for Technorati. Failing to cope with the vastly growing amount of blogs, they were forced to remove all content older than six months from the search index. Shrinking the index may have helped keep their infrastructure online, as a user I still frequently experience technical problems.

Keyword subscriptions are a good example of their technical problems. The feeds only work half the time, and when they do work you are often presented old or duplicate results. The service is unreliable at best and certainly not a joy to be dependent upon. Luckily, there may soon be a better alternative to work with.

Twingly links blogposts to other types of content. Last week they announced a syndication deal with De Telegraaf, a large Dutch newspaper. At the time I thought that was their only specialism, but when I revisited their website yesterday I noticed a lot has change.

The new website must have been launched right after the Next Web Conference. I wasn’t at the conference myself but I know the Twingly crew attended it. I’m assuming they wanted to wait the conference before unveiling their new services. I heard they gave out some private invites, but since I wasn’t attending I ended up on the waiting list. Luckily, I soon found myself a beta invite code

For those less lucky, I decided to post a couple of Twingly screenshots.

The main interface:

Searching for a keyword:

As you see in the screenshot above, a search for iPhone results in 98,625 hits. They only index linked-to or pinged-about blogposts so that score is not bad at all compared to the 247,034 hits I got from Technorati. The search speed is worth mentioning. It may just be the low amount of users, but results appear almost instantly after hitting the submit button.

Twingly aims to eliminate spam by putting together a whitelist of blogs. With new blogs being created every second, moderating would seem an impossible task. To cope, they must be using a greylist as well. The most sensefull approach is have your spiders looking within blogposts for links to other blogs. Good blogs don’t often link to splogs, so that would ease the amount of blogs that need manual moderation.

Technorati does little to prevent splogs from occurring in the index. The fact alone that Twingly aims for a zero-spam approach would be reason enough to use their service instead. And contrary to Technorati, Twingly is actively listening to user suggestions by offering a Digg-like system where users can add and vote on new feature suggestions.

Twingly is fast, spam-free and still evolving. Sure they are entering a new market, but leading party Technorati has frequent problems with their infrastructure. So where does that leave us? Will an old dog like Technorati be able to take the heat from the new kids on the block? Or will Twingly become the Technorati killer? Tell me what you think in the comments!