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.

This post was originally posted on TechCrunch.com where I cover the Israeli startup scene.

my6sense is announcing it has raised $2 million in Series A financing from private investors. The company is pioneering ‘digital intuition’, artificial intelligence designed to assist everyday users separate the signal from the noise. This is a problem that has grown in magnitudes of severity since the introduction of blogs and RSS into our lives, and compounded even further by the recent rise in popularity of streams (thank you Facebook & Twitter). In my initial review I tested my6sense’s technology which they chose to apply on an iPhone web app that basically acted like an RSS reader with, well, a sixth sense. The magical part was not only that it worked, it required me to do nothing but consume the content (in my case, blog posts). I didn’t have to rate content-to-interest relevance or assist the application in any way. It took a couple of days to achieve what I described as my “A-Ha Moment”:

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.

my6Sense will use the additional funding to advance R&D and its marketing efforts. It will also continue to focus on applying its technology in mobile applications. To this end, the company plans to release a native iPhone app in the very near future which we will be sure to cover.

This post was originally posted on TechCrunch.com where I cover the Israeli startup scene.

With the growing amount of information that is flowing into our lives, there is also a growing need for tools that help focus our attention on what should be the most relevant information for us. my6sense is developing artificial intelligence that does just that—it separates the signal from the noise and helps users shift their attention to the content they care about most. my6sense is calling this type of assistance “Digital Intuition” and in the simplest sense it’s a recommendation technology that automatically ranks and serves information that match user preferences at any given time.

my6sense is providing 500 TechCrunch readers Alpha invites. You can sign-up here.

In order to achieve effective information ranking my6sense goes about creating user preference models. my6sense’s magic sauce is in translating user actions, for example Web navigation, into semantically-sensible, rich, implicit feedback. So if a user picks the fifth headline in a ranked list, for example, the system would learn from that preference and present like items up top in the future.

The company makes a point in distinguishing what it does—ranking—to performing filtering. This can be best understood by the old adage: To find a needle in a haystack, one doesn’t have to burn the haystack, just make sure the needle lies on top of it. The beauty is that you don’t need to give the product feedback, it infers what your feedback is all on its own.

The “learning machinery” that makes sure the needle is on top of said haystack is rooted upon a multi-dimensional set of features comprising of:

• Content Components: Capturing textual content and classification, information sources and authorship as well as the structural properties of the messages.
• User Environment: Capturing when, where and in what context the information is being consumed.
• Social Connections: Capturing both preferences and instant feedback within various social and taste-based neighborhoods of the user.
• Interactions between the three.

Once filtering is achieved, my6sense then attaches context-relevant actions to the content. This is an important aspect of the service that is at the heart of the company’s future business model. The actions will be tied to rev-share deals struck with content and service providers, as well as mobile carriers. For example, music related content would trigger premium content and service actions such as ticket or ringtone purchasing.

The company is working on releasing a full blown API to this end during the coming year. In the meantime, they’ve developed a couple actions themselves, for example writing comments on posts based on Wordpress, TypePad, Blogsmith and Movable Type.

The company is initially targeting the technology at the mobile space rather than the Web. It has several reasons for doing so. First, the Web is a very crowded space to push such an offering into and there’s always the concern of becoming “just another cool application”. Second, the technology’s benefits are far clearer when applied to a mobile device and its inherent limitations when it comes to screen size and supplemental user control. Also, discovering content and information through a mobile device requires a different level of attention and consequently a different toolset than doing the same on the Web—my6sense is perfectly suited to this context.

For the past 10 days I’ve been testing the Alpha version of my6sense which is available only as an iPhone web app. I wasn’t ready to ditch my information consuming habits quite yet and was therefore concurrently reading RSS feeds through Google Reader. The methodology I applied was to click into the same posts on both apps to see what would happen on my6sense. 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.

It’s not nearly perfect—there’s a certain level of content noisiness the company purposefully put in for testing purposes—but for an Alpha product claiming to provide “digital intuition” it delivered. From my usage so far, the top most item is almost always from Hacker News. It is often followed in various orders by TechCrunch, TechMeme, and Lifehacker. The items themselves usually relate to Google, Facebook, and the iPhone which didn’t entirely surprise me, but that doesn’t mean I typically read every post I come across having to do with them. In the case of the items floated by my6sense, I felt compelled to read them all. Remember, this was all done without providing implicit feedback such as thumbs up, down, or rating of any sort. The screenshot below shows the top items my6sense analyzed as most relevant for me today.

Is “digital intuition” really important? Here’s one example that leads me to believe that it is: I engage with Facebook in three ways. Directly with Facebook.com, using the iPhone Web App and finally using Facebook’s native iPhone App. Here’s the curious part. My News Feed is not symmetric across the three—meaning, I get different News Feeds for each one. While they may not be radically different, they still float different items. I can’t explain this, but it certainly leads me to believe that Facebook is putting an effort into this realm as well.

(Disclosure: Nearly a year ago, on a Sangria-laden evening in Barcelona, I struck a friendship with two of my6sense’s co-founders, Barak Hachamov (Visionary Geek & Chairman) and Avinoam Rubinstain (CEO). I’ve been following their company’s progress since then).

This post was originally posted on TechCrunch.com where I cover the Israeli startup scene.