Twingly Summer of Code

Twingly's 2008 summer developer program created an ambitious visual interactive system for exploring the global blogosphere. The project tackled the challenge of making millions of blogs across languages and categories navigable and zoomable, bringing together a small team of developers united by shared passion for Web 2.0 technologies and solving complex technical problems. The work culminated in a public presentation at the Reboot 10 conference in Copenhagen.

Project Concept

The core vision was ▶ 0:39 to build a unified interface for exploring ▶ 1:29 "any language, any category, and any blog in the world." Rather than treating the blogosphere as searchable text, the team created a visual, interactive model where users could navigate from the global level down to individual blogs through both category and language filters.

Technical Features

The interface displayed blogs organized across multiple dimensions:

• Multilingual scope: The system supported ▶ 0:39 French, Portuguese, and English communities, enabling exploration across language boundaries.

• Category exploration: Users could browse ▶ 0:39 distinct categories—sports, fashion, family, technology, and personal—and zoom into specific areas of interest.

• Interactive drill-down: Within category views like the ▶ 1:04 technology blogosphere, users could interact directly with individual blogs, moving seamlessly between the macro view of all blogs and engagement with single voices.

Conference & Event

In June 2008, the Twingly Summer of Code team traveled to ▶ 0:20 the Reboot 10 conference in Copenhagen. The team arrived to find ▶ 0:39 the location beautiful and used the event as an opportunity to showcase their interactive demo publicly.

Team

The summer program brought together four developers with complementary skills:

• Jonas: An ▶ 0:20 entrepreneurial team member willing to take on diverse tasks, providing flexibility and broad capability.

• Christopher: A ▶ 0:37 Web 2.0 enthusiast with exceptional multitasking abilities and an impressive gift for visualizing systems mentally before implementation.

• Helena: A detail-oriented perfectionist who, despite being ▶ 0:49 shy on camera, was warm and social offscreen. She undertook heroic efforts to navigate beta development tools and ensure quality.

• Fredrik: A ▶ 1:03 passionate tech specialist who thrived on solving hard and complex technical problems, driving the deeper engineering challenges.

During the summer, the team also engaged in ▶ 0:21 debugging work, smacking down bugs as part of the development cycle.