Twingly Channels let you track memes around any topic

Swedish start-up Twingly is launching channels tomorrow that find the most socially relevant news around any topic.
Twingly’s channels are a more sophisticated kind of real-time search or meme tracker that will pull up recently published items on a topic and filter them by how much they’ve been commented on or shared. It pulls links and comments from Twitter, and the company plans to add data from social bookmarking services Digg and Delicious later. (The first 300 readers can check out Twingly channels here with the invite code ‘VENTUREBEAT’ starting at 1 a.m. PST tonight).
“We wanted to use collective intelligence to create a high quality filter for the audience,” said CEO Martin Kallstrom.
Twingly CEO Martin Kallstrom
It’s a little different from other real-time search startups because you can interact with the results by leaving comments. As in FriendFeed, Twingly users can “like” a link and boost it higher in the rankings.
The company says its channels can be used by companies that want to track how people are talking about their brands or competitors. It can also be a space where a company can interact with its customers or fans. It could be a pretty neat way of tracking news too.
Twingly, which is based just south of Stockholm, has been around for three years and built its business model off serving Europe’s larger newspapers with Twingly Blogstream, a product that shows how the blogosphere is interacting with news coverage. They charge anywhere from $7 to 20,000 a year for the service. The company says it’s approaching breakeven point.
It also launched a microblog search earlier this year, which we said could become overwhelmed by the sheer amount of tweets. So this new release is clearly an improvement over that.
Below’s an example of a Twingly channel around the hot Swedish music startup Spotify.