Ginx: Twitterizing The Web

I glanced at Michael Parekh’s blog and noticed he was now streaming his tweets there in a sidebar, like many others. A tweet caught my eye, something about $AAPL, using the Apple ticker. I clicked the shortened URL in the wteet, from a new service I hadn’t heard of: Ginx. Here’s what came up:

Ginx, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Looks like Ginx resolves the shortened URL and frames it into a new browsers window, something like how Stumbleupon works.

At the top I see the Ginx info in a narrow bar, with Michael’s original tweet. There is an easy way to reply to the originator of the tweet in a field to the right, which toggles among @reply, dm, retweet, and the resolved URL. Hitting the ‘reply’ button brought me to a dialog which asked me to login either to Ginx or Twitter to send my message. I don’t have a Ginx account — private beta — but I hope to soon.

Ginx is an example of how the social messaging of Twitter’s platform can insinuate itself into the world, and change our model of sharing.

I expect that this Ginx framing model will be picked up by other URL shorteners, like Bit.ly and Tinyurl, at least as an option.

[disclosure: Bit.ly is a (new) client of mine, but my interest is very general in this case.]

update 12:39pm ET 31 Jan 2009 - I just discovered that Ginx is a service of ‘secretive start-up’ Peer News, and that Pierre Omidyar is involved.