I met up with Randy Ching, co-founder of Ginx alongside eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, this afternoon to finally get a glimpse of what their secret startup is all about.
We first wrote about Ginx last month when it was revealed that parent company Peer News had raised $2 million in funding. At the time, we could only infer its purpose from Omidyar’s twitter account, which was hooked into Ginx somehow.
Now we know that it’s basically an interface for Twitter on steroids. Ching explains that the most fundamental purpose behind Ginx is to help people share news and other content over the internet. Citing the figure that 20% of all tweets contain links, Ching says that Ginx was built to make better use of them, to encourage more sharing of links, and to connect people who didn’t know each other already along the way.
Functionally, Ginx is a replacement for the experience of using Twitter at Twitter.com. The small development team behind Ginx has used Twitter’s API to rebuild virtually all of the functionality found at Twitter.com. And then it has gone a few steps further to make sharing links easier and more powerful.
For example, when you look at tweets in Ginx, you don’t see TinyURLs that obfuscate their destinations. Rather, Ginx pulls out the original URL and displays it alongside the webpage’s title and an image from the page, if available. You can also click a tab to view only tweets that contain links, or only tweets that contain links that you have visited previously (for when you want to go back to something you once came across on Twitter).
When you click on a link, it takes you to the page but leaves a bar at the top with the Twitter username and avatar of the person who shared it with you. A box lets you enter a reply to that person, retweet their message, send a direct message to the person about the page, or create a brand new tweet with the link. This is intended to make it easier for people to respond to the content they’ve found on Twitter.
Back in the Ginx interface, the service tries to keep track of what people are saying about a particular link, even when they’re not in your follow list. Just click on the conversation link below a shared link and you’ll see a thread of messages pertaining to it, from anyone who uses Ginx (in this way it’s like FriendFeed but the replies are not restricted to people within your social circle). Ching says that this feature in particular is meant to help you discover new people with similar interests. (Update: I think I was a bit confused about this feature. It appears as though the conversations thread only shows replies to a particular person’s tweet that contains a link, not all messages about a particular link that has been shared on Twitter).
While Ginx is ostensibly focused on spreading journalism through the Twittersphere, it also takes liberties to improve the Twitter interface in a variety of unrelated ways (hell, if you’re going to rebuild the Twitter interface, you might as well go all out). There’s a feature that lets you view people’s timelines as they actually see them so you can get a better sense of what conversations they’re engaged in. When you copy a link into Ginx, it automatic calculates how long it’ll be once shortened so you have more room to type. And when you click on a term preceded with a hash mark (e.g. “#obama”), it’ll take you to a page that shows all tweets with that tag.
Right now Ginx is a sophisticated extension to Twitter, but Ching insists that the company will not limit itself to only one social network. It plans to eventually support lots of other networks in the future, perhaps when the other’s have opened up their APIs as much as Twitter has. As far as monetization goes, there are no firm plans on that front either, but Ching suggests that any revenue model may eventually have something to do with helping publishers spread their content to new audiences.
Even as things stand currently, Ginx is an intriguing service that essentially flips the idea of Digg on its head. Instead of the wisdom of the crowds dictating what you read online, Ginx intends to help you discover and share news with people you trust.
Ginx remains in private beta but we hope to share invites with readers soon.
2M for that? LOL
exactly lol
I always thought the interface of Twitter was lacking functionality so I’d like to thanks the guys behind Ginx that they finally use Twitter like it should be.
However as a business and not to mention a 2 million dollar funding, I find Ginx a little bit too dependant of the Twitter API. What if Twitter decides to incorporate the USP functionalities of Ginx? What if Twitter caps the API (it already has; 20′000 requests per hour)? What if Twitter bans Ginx from access to the API? I wouldn’t like to bet my $ 2m on it (not that I have 2m, that’s another story).
I know that they their (future) intentions is not to rely only on Twitter… but then this burden comes in to place: what is Ginx without Twitter…?
Just my 2 cents…
Not very exciting – following links/stories/… Waste life.
Why would they do that? People don’t use the twitter web interface, because they use Twitter clients like tweetdeck, twitterrific, etc.
Thats a waste.
I currently use Twitterfox… would you recommend another client to me?
Actually I use an alternate web interface, which i’ve converted into a desk-isque app through an SSB
It seems all these new apps are about aggregating whatever blogs/websites/feeds. I’m more interested in things like SpaceshipOne than following links, and what people talking about links.
Seems like they are trying to copy a lot of what we already offer. Too bad the copycats always seem to get more funding… Were still trying to raise our first round.
“a lot of what we already offer”
Seems like a overstatement, looking at TwittUrly.com (how do I make links here?)… but I very much like the concept of your website though..
They do offer a lot of other things too, but the stuff about following the links on Twitter to group them, among a few other things, rings similar to us.
I’m glad you like it. With us though, you don’t do any linking on our site, just tweet a link on Twitter, and it’ll show up on our site, for you, here: http://twitturl...m/user/mmtercan
I actually meant: how to make links in TechCrunch comments, sorry…
…but this feature really impressed me very much
I’ve bookmarked the url… thanks!
Except they’re not focused on aggregating votes from lots of people to surface the most popular content.
“Even as things stand currently, Ginx is an intriguing service that essentially flips the idea of Digg on its head. Instead of the wisdom of the crowds dictating what you read online, Ginx intends to help you discover and share news”
To me that sounded like they were going to focus on what we do, but also have additional frills. I apologize if my statement was incorrect.
Just for the record what Hendrickson is saying is that the nugget of goodness is in the fact that they are crowd-sourcing good content instead of using a game-able voting system employing strangers.
That nugget is exactly what we have been refining at splaht! since our demo-pit booth at TechCrunch50 as you can read on our crunchbase profile.
We decided not to rely entirely on Twitter’s API, but we do allow simultaneous multi-Twitter-account posting with Facebook coming soon.
splaht! is in invite-only beta, but for credibility we will accept the first 100 private-beta registrations at: http://www.splaht.com (that is unless TC wants an exclusive on more invites as we intended to public launch at TC50 this year).
Just the same, good luck Ginx…you owe me a Coke.
Wait? Someone’s raised $2mil for an app that’s a GUI that sits on top of Twitter… yeah, good luck with that.
Another site that requires my Twitter username and password? No thanks. I’ll wait for OAuth.
I totally get this. When someone follows me I always look through their last 3 pages of tweets to see if they’re worth following back.
If they are linking to news or other web gems that I haven’t seen but are relevant and interesting (and I hadn’t heard about) then I follow. If not I don’t.
Twitter is a discovery tool for me, now where are the Ginx invites!
*waiting for a start up of $ 3m that enables you to give kudos to Twitter users…
companies based solely around twitter are a bad idea. What happens if Twitter goes away, is sold to an unfriendly new owner, closes their api, etc, etc?
I have to admit the uniqueness here eludes me.
Ginx sounds like the second coming of Pownce (and that story didn’t end well) or a slightly more sophisticated iteration of Firefox extension Power Twitter.
https://addons....efox/addon/9591
Whoa.. This totally kills Ginx.
Yes, I thought of Power Twitter too.
Secret startup? ooh.. this is boring. Don’t gimme no secret startup business…
View link preview??? Big fuckin deal!
What do we have here, a new category: Guitters.
Barbara Walters might say Twubble ahead: Twitter + Bubble + Trouble.
Ok – I will stop now.
nice
It’s down …
If a website cannot handle only techcrunch reader.. then I guess it should be in deadpool already ..
yet another twitter … with major downtime …
I am starting to get sick of all this twitter apps, maybe I am just tired, maybe not.
Ginx is currently down for maintenance.
We’re very sorry for the inconvenience. We’ll be back shortly!
NOT TOO GOOD
Yet another site that asks for your twitter password… after twitter got hacked I would never enter my password into a 3rd party twitter app
TweeTree is another similar service – which I liked.
could this be a competition to twitter?
I don’t know, but good question which I hope leads to a really interesting discussion here.
The interface is clean, and the conversations feature is pretty nice, especially if you have a few people you follow who tend to RT and @ frequently
re: Robins comment – Using both ginx and powertwitter, I actually find them different and like both for different reasons. Ginx – the link source and conversations features; powertwitter – facebook integration, tweet previews of who you follow and search on the home page. Granted I use twitter frequently and now have 2 accounts, so I may be a non typical use case
A large number of my tweets contain links, and Ginx has saved time by allowing me to just paste in a link as part of the normal process of writing 140 chars. The interface calculates how many characters I have left assuming the URL will be shrunk. I was using Power Twitter and Digsby before which involved several steps to enter a shortened URL into my tweet…an awkward writing process especially when done over a mobile device. The link previews and the utility bar over clicked links also make tweeting a bit more efficient.
invite please i wanna see
Invite me!