Twitter’s greatest strength is also often its greatest weakness: it’s a simple, constantly-updating stream. This keeps information fresh and flowing, but it also means that if you step away for a few hours (or even a few days — crazy, I know), you’re likely to miss a lot. And it means that scanning your Twitter stream can sometimes be tedious. A new product launching from my6sense today aims to alleviate both those issues.
The my6sense Chrome browser extension takes your tweet stream and completely rearranges it. If that thought scares you, fear not, this is done in a new tab area that the extension creates on Twitter.com. This area holds a stream sorted by tweets that are likely to be most relevant to you. These tweets can be hours (or even days) old, or they may be brand new. It all depends on the relevancy.
So how does my6sense determine this relevancy? A number of ways. The links you click on, the tweets your favorite, the tweets you retweet, the author of the tweets, the keywords in those tweets, etc. It all is monitored by this extension and then used to serve tweets back to you. And it works well. Once the extension got a sense for what I was interested in, pretty much my entire stream became Apple news. Perfect.
The concept is an extension of the mobile applications that my6sense makes for the iOS and Android platforms. Those take into account a few different social signals (Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz, etc), and gives you a stream of information you’re likely to care about. And that works because when you’re on the go, you may not have time to read through all of your social streams. Again, it’s the same sort of idea here, but parsing only the ever-flowing Twitter data.
The idea is a good one. A lot of users would value a way to surface tweets based on relevancy rather than simply time. There have been whispers of Twitter themselves working on similar concept as well, but they would likely focus on user relevancy, rather than tweet relevancy. And the truth is that my6sense hopes that Twitter.com is just another stop for their technology.
The Israel-based startup hopes to spread their attention graph across the web to all kinds of different sites. VP of Marketing, Louis Gray, cites Quora as on particular treasure trove of data they’d love to get their hands on.
You can find the Chrome extension here, and the plan is to release a Firefox extension shortly as well to bring the same functionality to a larger segment of the web.