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Micromessaging service Twitter still doesn’t make sense to most people I know. When they start following other Twitter users, they just see a mishmash of unorganized thoughts from those people pouring in — and who wants to read nonsense? A new startup called Ginx took another step towards solving that problem last night. It now [...]

Micromessaging service Twitter still doesn’t make sense to most people I know. When they start following other Twitter users, they just see a mishmash of unorganized thoughts from those people pouring in — and who wants to read nonsense? A new startup called Ginx took another step towards solving that problem last night. It now lets you organize like-minded Twitter users into groups, allowing you to filter streams of tweets loosely based on topics that these people tend to talk about.

Redwood City, Calif.-based Ginx (pronounced “jinx”) has the larger goal of making it easier for people to share and discover news through a customized Twitter interface. While the service is still in private beta — we have invite codes for you, below — it already provides some useful features that Twitter itself doesn’t. It shows you headlines and images from news articles and other links that people share on Twitter, and lets you easily track Twitter messages (or “tweets”), organized by conversations that people are having. For more details on how Ginx works, see my previous write-up.

Here’s how the new feature works. A Ginx user creates a group by creating a new Twitter account and following users on Twitter who they want in the group. Then, the user defines a theme, and adds Twitter users to that group. Some example groups are investors on “vctweeters ,” technology bloggers on “techbloggers ” and “chinameme” starring English-language speakers with insights into what’s happening in China today. Other Ginx users can decide to follow groups via this directory. Each group gets a page that shows you who’s in it, then you click on the “follow group” button to follow it. This way, you can see the tweets from any member of the group within your Ginx homepage. But wait, this feature would seemingly just fill your Twitter homepage with tweets from even more people who you might not know. Ginx allays that problem by letting you sort tweets from groups. Once you join a group on Ginx, you see boxes for that group on your Ginx homepage — you can filter tweets from these groups by toggling a check mark on or off next to each box, then refreshing the homepage.

Ginx cofounder (and eBay founder) Pierre Omidyar says one inspiration for groups was the effort by Christine Lu, a China and U.S.-based businesswoman and web radio host, to create a way for Twitter users to easily find people who had smart things to say about China. She already had her own personal Twitter account, so she created a separate Twitter account called “chinameme.” Follow that account, and you can see tweets from Christine about other China-focused Twitter users who say smart things. Omidyar contacted Lu, and had her create the “chinameme” group within Ginx as a more efficient way to help people stay informed about China-related information.

The problem of organizing tweets

In the brief time that I’ve played around with the new Ginx group feature, it seems to work well enough. One problem is that the Twitter users who are placed into groups don’t stay focused on how the groups define them. So you’ll see tweets from venture capitalists about going to sleep, tweets from tech journalists about their favorite music, etc. Another Ginx feature is a way to sort tweets based on a community standards for identifying topics on Twitter and other micromessaging services, called hashtags. A hashtag is just the name of a topic preceeded by the pound sign — some examples are #obama for tweets about President Barack Obama and #youtube for tweets related to YouTube. One opportunity for Ginx to further refine group tweets is to only show tweets from group members that contain a specific hashtag. So only messages like #myspace and #facebook for a Ginx group for people tweeting about social networks. Another Twitter-filtering site called Stocktwits already does this, in its own way. Designed to show you the latest stock news, it sorts tweets from people who have joined the Stocktwits site, who tweet messages that contain the dollar sign ($) followed by a publicly-traded stock symbol ($AAPL for Apple).

Hashtags and Ginx groups aren’t exactly intuitive for the typical web user trying to figure out how Twitter itself works, though. A massive education campaign on the part of Twitter, its rather devout user base, and third-party services will be necessary before these sorts of features go mainstream. Some good news for the emerging Twitter ecosystem is that journalists and other demi-celebrities are already hard at work talking about Twitter far more than most people use it — we know its a good way to share our articles and get more people reading us.

Stepping back inside the Twitter bubble, another question is how Ginx will compete against Twitter itself and other third-party services that let you filter tweets. Twitter has said it intends to make the service more intuitive to people. Twitter could one day add links, conversation and groups features like what Ginx already offers. Meanwhile, desktop Twitter applications like Tweetdeck also let you create groups of people you follow on Twitter to more easily organize incoming tweets — indeed I prefer a desktop app, Twhirl, over Ginx right now because it updates in real-time instead of requiring a page refresh.

I asked Omidyar about these issues. He says that the company is trying to build broadly useful sharing features to begin with, so it can better understand user behavior. This way, the service can refine itself around the most valuable news-sharing behavior instead of trying to build a site from scratch around a content vertical. In terms of building a desktop version to allow for real-time updates, Omidyar says the company would love to have one, but it wants to focus on figuring out group features and behavior first.

If you want to join Ginx and start trying out these features, here is an invite code for the first 100 people who use it: 1DE80CFF40A6. You can follow the Ginx group for VentureBeat writers here.

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