Our best guess is that Ginx is a Twitter management service that recommends news items and other users you should meet, based on your interests. If we're correct with that guess, we're quite excited about it - few technologies hold as much promise as recommendation based on aggregate social media activity.

Ginx is being used as a URL shortener on Twitter by a handful of people, including Omidyar himself. When you click through one of the shortened URLs the destination page appears in a frame below a Ginx bar on the top of the page where you can see the text of the Tweet that sent you to the page and reply on either Twiiter or inside Ginx. See this link, for example.

Update: Omidyar pinged us on Twitter this afternoon to point us to a very short press release confirming that Ginx "is a Twitter client that aims to provide Twitter users with a rich experience for sharing and discussing links. Ginx was created to enable people to become more actively engaged in the news and topics they care about."

Ginx appears to pull images from pages referenced on Twitter onto its users' account pages, and it offers its own signals when actions like Direct Messages are successfully completed on Twitter. There is also a mobile version.

The app appears to have been under development since summer but just began very limited public testing over the weekend. There is a whole lot of data available in the world of shortened URLs - but most services in this sector have left that data on the table unused for years. That trend is changing (see Bit.ly for example) and we expect that Ginx will be a sophisticated entrant into this market.

Given Omidyar's interests in social good and crowd sourcing, Primack's observation that the parent company's name is "Peer News" and the similarity between the words "Ginx" and "Jinx" (i.e. when two people say the same thing at the same time) - we suspect that this company aims to introduce users with similar interests to each other and track popularity of news on Twitter.

According to Primack's research Peer News has raised about $2 million for Ginx. Given its funding and pedigree, we expect to see something very cool when the service comes out into the light of day.