We’re excited to announce today the forming of a new company, Reverb Technologies, Inc., which will incorporate Wordnik.com.

Over the past five or so years, as we’ve been working on Wordnik.com, we’ve realized that the technology we’ve been developing — not just Wordnik, but things like Swagger and a bunch of other tools and systems — was making Wordnik bigger on the inside than on the outside.

tardis, by feitoamao

With Wordnik.com, we’ve focused on one word at a time, and late last year we showed a little of what we could do at a slightly bigger scale with the beta launch of Related Content by Wordnik (now called Reverb for Publishers) but with the launch of Reverb today, we’re working to bring our technology to more developers, more publishers, and more consumers.

What does this mean for Wordnik.com? Well, Wordnik is now free to do what it does best — be a fantastic dictionary offering “360-degree views” of words, the biggest in the world, with the best users. We won’t have to drown it in ads, and we can continue to work on making it the best “single-word” view on Reverb’s word graph technology. The data we get from how users interact with Wordnik — listing, commenting, favoriting, and tagging words — will continue to be an important part of Reverb’s mission of connecting people with meaningful content.

As part of our continuing work on Wordnik.com, we’re happy to announce a new beta feature today — Wordmaps. Here’s one for apt (which is what we hope you think our new name is):

In the maps, squares get their size from the amount of “Wordnik love” a word has received (including listing and loves, among other things) and the color of the squares is driven by our calculation of how much the related word “matches” the mapped word. This feature is still in beta while we tweak our algorithms, so feedback is greatly appreciated!

(Also, check out the new floaty menus, a much-requested feature to help make it easier to jump right to whatever part of the word page you need.)

There’s much more coming, both from Reverb and for Wordnik.com. We’re looking forward to sharing it all with you!

[Photo: CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 by feitoamao]