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Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, announced this morning that he's closing down his Twitter client Ginx early next year and instead focusing on an online local news project. We reviewed a "private pre-alpha" version of Ginx in February and called it a dud. Ginx had some nice ideas but wasn't terribly innovative and it's finest points have now been reproduced in Twitter's own Lists.

Little is known yet about Peer News, Omidyar's next project, but an editor is being sought for hire. The project will begin in Hawaii, where Omidyar lives, but is intended to rock the journalist world.

Remember that link I shared on Twitter yesterday? What if I told you I had a new tool that would help you find it again...and all it would cost was 1 year of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar's time? That would be insane, would it not?

That's exactly what we saw, though, when we got a sneak peak today at Omidyar's new product Ginx. We wrote about Ginx when PE Hub first caught wind of its funding last month. We hoped it would incorporate all kinds of data-intensive recommendation mystery awesomeness. It might later, but so far it's quite simple and we describe below how you can reproduce most of its functionality without changing your essential workflow and using a new tool.

eBay founder Pierre Omidyar has joined the executive team of a stealthy new startup called Ginx, according to financial filings unearthed by PEHub. Very little is known about the company but based on passing whispers from early testers of the private data we have have some guesses about what the service does.

Ginx appears to be a people and news recommendation service built out of a Twitter publishing tool and a URL shortener. We think that sounds great, those lightweight technologies hold huge stores of valuable data. The company has raised about $2 million in funding so it's the real deal, not a fly by night operation. Check out a screenshot below and our full coverage of Omidyar's new gig over on Jobwire, our blog covering new hires in tech and new media.