Forums have been around since the Internet was created. Although they weren’t called forums back then (think BBS) they have always been the place of conversation. Today, forums are as prevalent as ever. If you can think of a topic, chances are, there is a forum dedicated to it with a big following. All sorts of discussions can take place on a forum, including discussions about you or your blog. Twing.com which is a new service still in beta hopes to aide in the discovery of community surrounding your content.

Twing’s aim is to provide access to the wealth of information flowing through online communities, and to make it easier and faster for users to find.

Forums are usually a good place to find deep conversations related to specific subjects. If your blog covers one of these subjects, using Twing to find out which forums are talking about you would be an excellent way to figure out which communities you could join to actively partake in those discussions.

There are three ways in which to search Twing. Either by posts, topics or forums. When I typed in BloggingPro into the search box for posts, it was great to see that some of the articles written on this domain were being discussed within a number of forums. The posts feature of the Twing search engine searches for the keywords within posts on a forum. Simple enough right? When I searched Topics for bloggingpro, Twing responded by telling me there were no results found. Obviously, no one had placed bloggingpro into the actual title of a forum post. The last way of searching (Forum) also netted zero results. However, when I placed a space inbetween blogging and pro, I saw a large number of results for the keywords (pro blogger) which is completely different from blogging pro.

I understand why Twing is still labeled a beta. Their website leaves a lot to be desired with missing sections on the Community Buzz page. The Twing How-To does little to help you use the service as the page is blank. The last post on the Twing.Blog was on June 9th so the company looks like it’s still alive.

The more forums that allow Twing to crawl their content, the more useful Twing will be. I think the idea behind Twing is a good one considering it deals specifically with Forums and nothing else. Of course, the same content Twing crawls is the same content Google crawls which begs the question, “Why would I use Twing over Google”? Because Google gives you everything related to the search query while Twing is focused on highlighting communities that are engaged in your content.

Give Twing a try and let me know if it’s picked up any good discussions related to your blog.

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