Intwition Relaunches – Now Tracks Online Chatter, Breaks News

The site Intwition, formerly a Twitter app, just relaunched yesterday as a whole new service. This new version of the site, only ten days old, aims to find and display what stories are being discussed on the internet right now. Initially, those stories come from Twitter as the primary source of that chatter, but as time goes on, other inputs will be added.

The way Intwition works is by listening to the online chatter, and when the chatter level is high enough, posting an unconfirmed story on the homepage.

Example: "Unconfirmed: Something Happening with Earthquake, China, Maginitude, 7.8, Felt"

After that initial posting, Intwition then scans the web looking for articles from verified sources as well as pictures and video. As these items are found, they are posted on the homepage in order of their popularity and relation to the story. Stories stay up as long as they are being discussed. Major stories are highlighted in red or orange and older and minor stories are in smaller text in the bottom of the homepage.

In addition, there is a "new scoop finder" on the right hand side of the page, a feature which updates every minute with the top phrases being discussed now. Click these items to be shown links to tags that are associated with that word or phrase. 

Assuming this all works as described, the site functions as an automated "breaking news" service for what’s being discussed on Twitter. That’s sounds hard enough (especially considering the Twitter outages as of late), but to then expand it to scan even more sources on the web sounds like a giant undertaking.

When I tried it tonight (OK, this morning 1 AM – thanks Starbucks, for the insomnia!), the top story was Senator Kennedy’s malignant tumor – a story picked up 11 hours ago, but still being hotly discussed as of 4 minutes ago. The word "malignant" also appeared in the sidebar linked to "brain," "senator," "tumor," "kennedy," and "malignant." I have to admit, I haven’t watched anything but a few minutes of local TV news for the past few days, so I don’t know how "old" or "fresh" this story really is, but on Google News, I found stories on this as old as 8 hours ago, and as recent as 31 minutes ago. Since Intwition picked up the story 11 hours ago, that sounds like they may have been faster than traditional media. However, I’ll need to watch this for much longer than a few minutes to know for sure that this is the case.

What’s really cool about the service is that you don’t have to visit the site to get the scoop on what’s being discussed – you have the option to subscribe to the Intwition RSS feed . You can also follow them on Twitter, but it doesn’t appear that the stories are being posted there – it’s more of a "what’s up with the service" thing there (bummer).

Can Intwition help change the way we hear about news? Only time will tell, but it’s definitely worth keeping an eye on.