Fight Information Overload on Twitter.com with My6Sense

Given how many links your Twitter friends likely post to their timelines every day, it’s almost inevitable that you will miss some very interesting stories. What if there was a piece of software that could learn which stories you are most interested in and highlight those for you, no matter when they were posted? I often use my6sense‘s mobile app on the iPhone to catch these stories, but starting today, you can also use the company’s Google Chrome plugin that integrates directly into Twitter’s own website (a Firefox plugin is also in the works).

My6sense has long been my favorite recommendation service, but until now, the only way to access its service was through its mobile apps for iPhone and Android. The company’s mobile app also recommends stories from your Facebook account and RSS feeds (including a tight integration with Google Reader). As more of us have come to rely on Twitter as a source for interesting stories, however, it only makes sense for my6sense to bring its service to Twitter directly, especially given that Twitter has greatly expanded the functionality of its own web service over the last few months.

Once installed, a new option to sort your timeline based on my6sense’s “digital intuition” will appear on your Twitter homepage. The plugin gives you the option to limit the timeframe of tweets you see to just the last 6, 12, 24 or 48 hours. Over time, my6sense then learns which stories you are most likely interested in, based on which tweets and links you read, reply to, favor and retweet. The service also looks at a tweets metadata, including the source, time and, of course, the content of the story behind the link.

Another nifty feature of the plugin – and one that would make installing it worthwhile even without the recommendation service – is that the plugin expands Twitter’s own ability to preview content in the right pane and can show excerpts from articles right in Twitter’s own preview pane.

My6sense twitter integration

If you are already using the service on your iPhone or Android phone and have linked your Twitter account with your my6sense account, the service will automatically recognize this and your recommendations will immediately be highly relevant. If this is the first time you use my6sense, it’ll take a day or two before all the links it chooses for you are relevant.

Hopefully, this is just a first step for my6sense and we will soon see columns with tweets sorted by relevancy in apps like TweetDeck, Seesmic and HootSuite as well.