mytweetsense Makes Twitter Relevant, Personal and Mobile

When you follow as many people as I do on Twitter and other social networks, there is clearly the potential to feel as if you are going to miss something if you are not continuously connected. The sheer waterfall of information rushing into your Twitter client of choice is also often a confusing mess, with status updates mixed in with location check-ins, and actual, real, news, photos or video. Twitter's recent move to offer users Lists, helping to group relevant people, is a step in the right direction, but it still doesn't solve the issue of relevancy - finding information that is personally applicable to you, based on your own interests. Yesterday, my6sense, best known for their iPhone application that uses digital intuition to surface the best news for you from RSS, introduced mytweetsense, applying their strong digital intuition to your social streams.

As an advisor to the company, I have had access to mytweetsense for some time, and it is the first time I have really found Twitter useful as a news source, rivaling RSS. The product learns from my own activity, seeing what topics and sources I like to read, and surfacing the very best tweets from the more than 10,000 people I follow and bringing them to the top.



mytweetsense surfaces the best Twitter content to me on the iPhone
I have set up mytweetsense to look only for tweets that contain links. my6sense then presents relevant tweets, with links, as part of my news stream, either alongside my RSS updates, or in a folder dedicated to social streams. Clicking on a relevant tweet then presents an excerpt and headline from the shared link, much like you see on Facebook or other sites.

The idea behind mytweetsense is fairly simple, even if the implementation is hard, which explains why my6sense is the first to debut such a personally relevant filter for Twitter. mytweetsense does more than just surface interesting headlines and links, but it also parses the downstream URL and surfaces content that is relevant to me. That means that in a sea of @replies and personal conversations, mytweetsense can find me links on items I am most interested in, such as Google, the Real-time Web, Apple and iTunes.

Stalqer's Location Sharing App Hits iTunes Store

After a November preview of Stalqer, a location sharing application which connects you to your existing Facebook social graph, the application underwent a notoriously lengthy review cycle by the nice folks at the Apple iTunes Store. More than a month later, the program is now available for free download - joining the fray alongside more visible players Foursquare and Gowalla for geolocation.

(Download Stalqer from this iTunes link)



My Location and Friends' Updates on Stalqer

As noted in November, Stalqer is less about owning a specific venue and showing the frequency of visits. Instead, it operates around real friend connections, through Facebook, highlighting others' current locations, and their updates over time. You can even get Push notifications for specific friends, if you want notes on where they are at all times.

Gowalla Raises $8.4 Million for Location Check-in Service

Much of the talk from LeWeb and other Silicon Valley get-togethers of late has centered around geolocation and the future of how geolocation is going to be integrated in social activity, search, advertising and communication. To date, the most visible company centered on geolocation has been Foursquare. But Gowalla, based in Austin, Texas, has gained significant traction over the last three months, and today, announced the completion of a Series B funding round for more than $8 million, bringing their total funding to date to more than $10 million.

According to the company's press release, Greylock Partners led the round, which will be used to accelerate the company's growth and enable future development.

Despite Foursquare's share of voice, Gowalla has managed to attract 50,000 active users, who have checked in at 150,000 locations in nearly 100 countries. Unlike Foursquare, which requires the service to support specific cities, Gowalla users can participate anywhere they are connected. Gowalla is available for both Apple's iPhone and the Android platform, and all this growth has taken place in only ten weeks.

In contrast, Foursquare raised $1.35 million in September of 2009.

Twitter Maturation Continues As They Embrace Developers

As Twitter grows from early adopter curiosity to full-fledged mainstream phenomenon, the company is undergoing a much-anticipated and much-welcomed maturation process, one that comes following the company's highly-visible raise of a significant venture capital round, which valued them at a billion dollars, the hiring of well-respected team members from Valley titans Yahoo!, Google and Facebook, and the recent roll-out of new features to the platform, including Retweets and Lists. Today, at LeWeb, Ryan Sarver, Twitter's director of platform, unveiled even more proofpoints that show the company is moving beyond its shaky relationships with developers (and uptime) and looking forward to a more public, more robust experience.

Over the last two years, some of my more public criticisms of the service have centered around the company's struggles with uptime, and lack of transparency with developers, who often got short shrift as Twitter worked to keep its products stable, throttling API access or changing functionality, often with no warning. The results, in some cases, were drastic, leading to products being delayed, canceled, or simply rendered ineffective.