Company Overview

Tailrank was founded in late 2005 by web crawler and RSS expert Kevin Burton. Kevin is a serial entrepreneur and sold his previous company, Rojo, to Six Apart in late 2006.

Spinn3r was built to power Tailrank.com, our real-time blog analysis and topical relevance index which launched in early 2006. Tailrank monitors and ranks the live conversations happening every day. Tailrank's algorithms correlate and present the issues on the mind of the world's publishers every day to an audience interested in breaking news, trends, and other influencing factors.

Spinn3r was launched in August 2007 as a dedicated product after having numerous requests to license our backend infrastructure.

Since launching, Spinn3r has been consistently adopted by new startups needing access to the blogosphere. We're now crawling for startups who've raised in excess of $50M in VC funding.

Upcoming Conferences

» Our talk on the Spinn3r web crawler architecture entitled "Scaling MySQL and Java in High Write Throughput Environments" has been accepted at the 2008 MySQL Conference.

We present the backend architecture behind Spinn3r - our scalable web and blog crawler.

Most existing work in scaling MySQL has been around high read throughput environments similar to web applications. In contrast, at Spinn3r we needed to complete thousands of write transactions per second in order to index the blogosphere at full speed.

Tailrank in the Media

» In July 2007 Tailrank was featured on Lunch Meat where we had a chance to talk about Spinn3r:

The blogosphere is a noisy place filled with many interconnected conversations on all sorts of disperate topics. Tailrank, which calls itself a memetracker, is a service that tracks the zeitgeist of conversations in the blogosphere. I sat down with Kevin Burton, Tailrank's CEO and founder, and Jonathan Moore, brilliant engineer and hacker, at their home office to learn a bit about their services. Tailrank is built upon Spinn3r, another service that Burton and Moore built, that spiders and indexes the blogosphere.

» In December 2006, Tailrank was featured on the Scoble Show.

Kevin Burton is a talented developer who has worked on a variety of startups already including Rojo, and now TailRank which he started to be able to see what bloggers were talking about. Here I sit down with him for an interesting conversation in the lobby of San Francisco's Palace Hotel.