Background

Twitter is rapidly becoming the fastest communication channel when it comes to spreading news. Traditional media like CNN and the BBC push their news to twitter as soon as it's on their site, and new media such as BreakingNewsOn publish news directly to twitter, long before the traditional media cover it.

Flackr makes the news from Twitter accessible in dashboard form. During the 80's and 90's, if something happened, you would watch TV all day. Now, you can simply keep your browser open on our home page, and you'll get news updates as they happen, almost instantly. Flackr also creates pages per event where you can track all updates of a specific news item, and watch pictures and videos as they come in.

Flackr tracks many different news sources on twitter. Instead of having to follow them all, you just follow Flackr, and we'll filter out the hot news for you so you can concentrate on what's important.

More info in our FAQ. And if you're interested in behind the scenes info and our views on the news, make sure to check out our blog.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact us.

Geek stuff

Here's some info on the technology stack we run on and other details.

• Flackr is written in PHP 5.
• It heavily relies on Twitter technology.
• Most data resides in Memcache.
• Some data is stored in MySQL.
• Performance is enhanced by APC.
• The site is built using Zend Framework.
• The search feature is powered by Xapian.
• Except for the blog, which is a WordPress installation.
• We host at Slicehost.
• Our production servers run Ubuntu Linux 8.
• Our developers' favourite editor is Eclipse PDT.
• But we are also big fans of TextMate.
• And most of our development machines are Macbooks and iMacs.
• The algorithms that aggregate, process and combine news are top secret and closely guarded. If we're not careful, they might turn into Skynet.
• On the other hand, if that were true, Cameron would've visited us by now.