At this very moment, at this very villa in the Israeli city of Hertzeliya Pituach, the final preparations are being made for what can be best described as ‘TwitterSense’—a way to automatically filter your Twitter stream so that the most relevant Tweets come out on top. The location in question is the home of my6sense, which currently offers a powerful way to filter news feeds. It is applying its filtering technology to Twitter and by the looks of it you’ll soon be able to follow as many Twitter users as you want and still never miss out on the most important tweets.
It took insistent prodding on my part to get my6sense to spill some of the beans and give me a sneak peak. The good news is that TwitterSense (my term, not theirs) is real and it works. The bad news is that it’ll take a couple of more months to be deployed. And yes, it could greatly improve the way we consume Twitter streams.
The advent of a TwitterSense offering could not be timelier as the onslaught of noise on Twitter has increased dramatically and its manageability has become a real pain point. Even Robert “The Stream Prince” Scoble has had to take dramatic measures, namely, slashing the number of users he follows on Twitter and befriends on Facebook. I, on the other hand, keep the number of people I follow on Twitter in the neighborhood of 150. This number works well for me, but I keep wondering whether I’m missing out on users who could provide insights relevant to my personal and professional interests. That is exactly where TwitterSense would come into play.
First, a quick recap on my6sense: The company has been building out what it calls ‘digital intuition,’ a content ranking technology that to date has been applied to RSS feeds to separate the signal from the noise. My6sense’s technology translates user actions such as Web navigation within and across various streams of content, and actions taken with various pieces of information in different contexts, into semantically-sensible implicit user feedback. The real beauty is that it requires zero intervention other than using the app itself. Here’s how I described my experience with the alpha release:
The “A-ha moment” took a couple of days of interacting with the product, but it came. Suddenly, very relevant info was floated to the top of the main “TOP MESSAGES” pane. By relevant, I mean posts I would absolutely have clicked on through my Reader, but would have had to sift through hundreds of posts before doing so.
A couple of weeks ago my6sense announced its new native iPhone app (iTunes link), which along with a few new features, presented a major user experience improvement over the original iPhone web app version. So far there is nothing seemingly compelling beyond our previous in-depth look into the company’s technology. But looks can be deceiving. Underneath the surface lies what could transform the way my6sense users consume Twitter.
TwitterSense in an extension of my6sense’s ranking technology and in this respect treats a user’s Twitter stream like an ordinary content source, much like an RSS feed. To begin with, my6sense has to differentiate between simple status updates/personal tweets and tweets which link to content. The differentiation is a must because its ranking algorithms require further optimization to be able to correctly float important simple/status tweets. In the short-term they have no plans to solve this particular challenge. Instead, the company is focusing on ranking tweets with links—and we all get quite a few of those. From my6sense’s perspective, your friends provide the first level of filtering. It then provides the second level by taking it upon itself to re-rank these Tweets so a users’ focus is directed to the information that is most important to them.
If you tend to click on links from specific friends on Twitter, those will get a boost in the rankings. But my6sense also looks at the underlying pages behind the links and figures out what topics those pages are about using its semantic engine. If those topics match your interests, as determined by your past reading and clicking behavior on the app, then those links rise to the top as well.
So the obvious question to ask is, why then if it rests upon my6sense’s existing technology isn’t it deployed already? First, there are challenges in ranking the content behind the link. A typical web page includes not only the post/article itself, but additional data and content as well. my6sense wants to make sure it ranks the intended content and this isn’t always trivial.
Second, there are scalability challenges. On average, a Twitter stream encompasses a greater mass of content than an average RSS feed. This means that my6sense has to go out and parse every piece of content behind every link in a user’s steam so it can analyze it based on the user’s ranking model. This requires extra processing power in order to avoid significant delays in ranking. My6sense did close a round of funding recently, but it can’t just throw money at the problem and solve it via brute force (i.e. just buy more machines).
I asked Barak Hachamov, the company’s founder and president, whether they’ll be offering TwitterSense integration for Twitter clients. His answer was that they do have such plans but it’s far too early to talk about them now.
My6sense plans to make TwitterSense publicly available in a couple of months or so. In the meantime, if you want to experience what it will behave like I suggest downloading my6sense’s native iPhone app to see how it works on RSS feeds. You won’t have to spend very long waiting to see the ranking magic since some backend improvements were made that get users to achieve the ‘A-ha moment’ I mentioned above much quicker, even within one or two brief sessions. There’s also a new digital intuition meter that provides users with feedback regarding the status of their preference model and indicates how strong their digital intuition is at that point in time.
We’ll be keeping a close tab on the upcoming release of this so called TwitterSense and reexamine it when it’s made publicly available in a couple of months.
test
It’s the invasion of the Mossad. First they infiltrate database software. Next they target search and blogging. Today they steal social media and lifestreaming. Momma told me.
Watch out Ev. They’re coming.
from reading the iphone app reviews, i’m not the only person who can’t get their rss app to actually work – seems google reader crashes it, as does simple breathing i think. so i’m pretty luke on anything else they think they can do… i’ll wait, see & keep my excitement (which should this work, would return) in a bag for now…
Now I can follow as many people as I like. YES!
TwitterSense?? Glad to hear the date of launch. This would workout well and achieve a great hit as it provides filtering tech in Twitters. Actually Twitter needs it. The ranking mechanism of relevant tweets feature is really awesome.
The other bad part is it sounds like an AdSense for Twitter.
No, not at all. We do not have any intention to go to this direction.
That’s what I thought the headline meant. At last, I thought, a business model. But no.
Yup, that’s the first thing I thought of, too when I read the headline: AdSense for Twitter.
Me 3
me 4
I heard you can even become real time penpals by typing into an IRC, or Internet Chat Relay.
I made a Long Distance from my home in Arlington, VA to Chicago, IL. The cost was only 12 cents per minute. I wanted to ask about how to use the calendar function on my new PDA to plan out my days. They told me that I can Download the instructions from the World Wide Web. Wow, what technology. I asked the typist at work if we have the World Wide Web at our company. She said, no, but we have something very advanced called the Intranet. She proceeded to use the Personal Computer to send a CC Mail to someone for advice. He said that he does have access to the Information Super Highway at his home, and that he would go home and Dailup a connection, at which time he would Download the manual for my PDA. This is just incredible. He even says he Surfs the Web all the time.
Would anyone like to be Penpals with me via Telnet?
it would be interesting to see how do they define “relevant tweets”. Some of the persons I follow, tweet 5 times a day.
So how will it recongonize which tweet is relevant ?
As Roi mentioned, digital intuition is not yet employed fully in Twitter!!!, however, it does do a swell job of ranking your content from the standard RSS streams. I assure you that you will experience an incredible new way to consume your information on your iPhone.
Inviting you all to download and test it out: http://itunes.a...711292&mt=8
THIS IS SO AWESOME.
Soon the twitter sense pages will be automatically published to their own pages and aggregated by a super smart algorithm.
I will call these “web pages” and a “search engine”
Very interesting technology promised here. Of course, one could simply not follow people who have nothing to say to achieve the same results. That technology is available today
if i could just get it to work!
My iphone app still showing latest tweets from June and I cant connect with Facebook
M6S has great taste in presenters. What’s her name? She does top notch job of representing. Wowza.
Sometimes Digital Intuition (Girl) goes wrong…
http://www.yout...h?v=w6c5B8tHKek
How would you find feeds of your interest to register at my6sense? Try feedmil.com – a real-time feed search engine.
That sounds like a good service to me!
Does anyone even use twitter anymore?
No. The cutting edge things now are Telnet and IRC (Internet Chat Relay).
Um, http://TwitterSense.com sort of exists already.
As Roi mentioned, digital intuition is not yet employed fully in Twitter!!!, however, it does do a swell job of ranking your content from the standard RSS streams. I assure you that you will experience an incredible new way to consume your information on your iPhone.
Inviting you all to download and test it out: http://itunes.a...30;..2&mt=8
Barak Hachamov,
co-founder and visionary geek
my6sense
Seems like the TechCrunch effect is killing the site’s servers… Taking ages to load pages on it.
Good idea and alot of people going down this path but still feels disconnected in some ways. You’re gonna analyze what I eat and then realize what I’ll eat next, never asking me along the way. And maybe you’ll guess what I’ll eat next with a justified margin of error that I won’t mind, its not like you’re gonna tell me that anyways. I’ll have to take your word for it.
You’re then gonna passively watch, hey he linked that, shared that on facebook, that item meant more to him than the others. At least thats the assumption. And you still don’t want to really bother me to really understand the full context of why, just get at it via structured rule set.
So its really not that different than the way Google Reader keeps suggesting RSS feeds that i may of knew about but have opt’d not follow because of a reason that I never told Google and it never bothered to ask.
I have to wonder, this appears to improve discovery but its a computer attempting to analyze/reveal my native discovery process without ever getting to know me- and i dunno if a simple or extensive profiling tool would even do that.
It also begs the question do I really want this perfect find me whats good thing- yes it saves time, no i’m offended you think you can do that.
Ahhh technology…
Lots of great ads will find you, at the very moment of your weakness.
there are no adds in the app. none.
yeah, this thing sounds Google-ly. If it catches on, will that make Twitter reconsider their search algorhythm?
my6sense runs the risk of being too perfect and unbelievable for its customer
its one thing to have a best friend tell you what kind of shoes you’d be likely to buy in a store, its conversational, that friend got to know me, and i them,
but the my6sense mirror mirror on the wall just knows somehow and dictates blatantly almost at not only what shoes i’ll be likely to buy today, but tomorrow and beyond all without room for wonder or maybe in my selection
its the same reason i never take google reader up on its suggestions, a sense of control is lost, a sense of my choice never really being part of the game
no doubt their ranking tech and stuff is cool, and they openly admit they wont be tackling the bigger issue of really understanding me, but that doesn’t mean i’ll opt to adopt their perfect pattern finding tool for me either
i’m sure my6sense isnt the only firm on the planet about to dive head first into this all knowing space, SEO players in the lead just by sheer usage and pattern sniffing
Hmmmmm TwitterSense could make a lot of sense. This may be the key for alot of people I know who “just dont get twitter” a lot of people are so overwhelmed by the amount of tweets this could help organize all that.
My6Sense can’t even get their iPhone app to work more than half of them time. Network error, after Network error. And I am supposed to trust the to keep up with the Twitter fire-hose?
Ummm.. no thanks.
Twitter Sense already exists:
http://www.gabbr.com
The front page seems to list the non-hashasble twitter trending topics if youm compare it with http://search.twitter.com
This is not a trending tool, the ranking is base on your personal preference model gleamed from your individual usage. You wont get “popular” post you’ll get the post that you find interesting personally.
The more you use it (read feeds) the better the results become. Gabber and alltops are something wholey different.
I am curious to see how this will work and how it will change people/businesses’ tweeting. Sounds like a great idea though. When there are a lot of followers you end up with a lot of comments that are not relevant- or just too many comments in general. This is one way you will be able to read only the interesting and most related tweets.
I’ve been using the tool for months and the experience has been great. I do nothing, simply read my feeds as I always have and the tool learns from my actions what type of information I prefer. The number of things this software must understand and do to make this feature work is close to miraculous if you think it through; and that it invisible and takes no effort on the part of the user to train is beautiful.
Now it will do link content analysis on my twitter feed to boot! I follow about 200 people I find interesting and I ignore at least 70% of the links simply because the description is bad or I simple don’t have time to sort. I won’t miss the important stuff anymore, that’s huge.
The tool changed the way I consume data and has given me a clear edge. Whatever the temporary bug is that has given you trouble I say give it some more time, it’s worth it.
What this means for us, the consumers of all that information on twitter ( and elsewhere ) is that we can now have Twitter the way WE want it without having to trim out the fat by unfollowing everyone, just to get a more managable stream!
Have your cake and eat it too! Woo Hoo!
My6sense has made RSS useful again for many people like me who like to keep up with a variety of sources. Those sources sometimes produce jems that I want to consume, but often times not. My6sense has made mining those jems as easy as opening their app!!! U love it!
Great article! From the sound of it ‘TwitterSense’ already exists via TipTop (http://feeltiptop.com). Not only can you use TipTop search widgets on your website to display top results from Twitter on any search term, sentiment value, or related concepts like for ’social search’
(http://widgets....social%20search),
but you can easily search TipTop to generate dynamic urls for any topic or person discussed on Twitter like:
http://feeltipt...m/TwitterSense/ and http://feeltipt....com/roicarthy/
TipTop finds what’s useful on Twitter, provides filtering tools to discover what you need from the variety of content published, and enables you to reach out and share experiences with others through Re-Tip, Retweet, and Reply message features.
wonderful idea tweet sense can benefit many people in many ways organization is one key
well we all are hoping for such .. so we can filter all those spammy message and useless message that people updates on twitter.
it looks like a great tool, i should definitely adopt it…
Regarding slashing the number of people to follow on Twitter to keep from being overwhelmed – Is that not a job for TweetDeck, or am I missing something? I know on TweetDeck, I can create different groups, so my ‘Primary’ group has the most interesting people & no Twitter spam. TweetDeck is far from perfect, but the grouping ability is very nice. That would get you more than halfway to what TwitterSense is trying to do, no?
I’m a huge fan of my6sense !
I use it for managing and reading all of my RSS feeds. After few days of a learning curve, you can see clearly that the system actually knows you and knows which content you prefer.
AMAZING technology !
Simple as that, you don’t have to put any feedback to the system. With my6sense I don’t need any other tool to consume relevant information. It’s the absolutely the ultimate content product for me.
I recommend for everyone, just try it out,
and I promise – you’ll see the magic.
We have been building a technology that also recommends content in twitter. It’s a research prototype, but available at http://zerozero88.com if you want to try it out.
really its too awesome, amazing guys\
http://live-point.net