Spinn3r Launches Today

It's been a lot of work but today we're proud to announce the release of Spinn3r.

Spinn3r is a web service that companies can use to index the blogosphere instead of having to write their own spider.

Instead of spending months designing a scalable backend infrastructure and fighting spam you can just start using our spider tomorrow.

We already have a few stealth startups using the service (and of course Tailrank) and should have more announcements in the next few weeks.

We also didn't want to exclude anyone which is why we have licensing for non-profits and researchers.

With our recent upgrade, the Spinn3r is indexing over 1 million, high-quality, spam-free feeds. And now with Spinn3r, it's all available to you.

Update: The blog coverage is starting to roll in. Adam Kalsey and Techcrunch are covering the story now.

Update 2:

And Ben Metcalfe has commentary as well:

News and Blog memetracker TailRank has opened it’s backend API - allowing anyone to access the raw output from the product’s blog spider. The name of the new project is called Spinn3r. Hey, at least Kevin didn’t call it Spinnr, I guess.

...

Kevin claims TailRank indexes more than 1 million of the most popular blogs and feeds, minus the spam and splogs. That index is available via Spinn3r.

Update 3:

And Pete Cashmore over at Mashable adds some thoughts as well:

At noon PST today (about now), the social news tracker Tailrank is launching Spinn3r, a solution that opens up the company’s spidering infrastructure so that other services can build applications on top of the blogosphere. Founder Kevin Burton has mentioned on his blog before that Tailrank was offering its “clean” index to outsiders, so it’s no surprise that they already have more than 6 customers signed up for the service.

Comments

[Bilal Hameed]

This will surely be a game changer, I always believe that there is more room in being an infrastructure provider than in competing on the application end. The success of Amazon S3 as a storage infrastructure and VideoEgg as a video platform for social networks is a proof of the viability of this approach.
More about it here.
http://startupmeme.com/2007/03/29/tailrank-spins-its-platform-as-a-service/

[Scott]

why should I use Spinn3r rather than the Alexa web service?

(I'm not trying to be difficult, I actually want to know what the difference will be for me.)

[Phill Midwinter]

Just found your service, looks very interesting (i'm a search engineer myself) will have a look at the details soon. congrats on your launch.