Twingly to bring a Ninja’s touch to realtime sharing

Swedish startup Twingly has today hinted that something big, possibly involving ninjas, is coming from the company soon.

Twingly has been offering a blog trackback service since early 2007 and more recently launched a blog searching tool that compares favourably to its better known rivals, Google Blog Search and Technorati.

Now the company has announced ‘Project Shinobi’, a mysterious product that they claim “will become the next great platform for social media”.

Taking its name from a 1980s Sega videogame about ninjas, Project Shinobi appears to be some kind of real-time social news aggregation tool. In a vague blog post today, CEO Martin Källström writes:

“On October 1st, 2009, Twingly will join the ranks of web services working together to improve your experience of social and traditional media. With Project Shinobi, we are aiming to provide a more social, more relevant and more realtime experience, integrating with the services you already use. Not only for people that are early adopters of social media, but accessible and immediately valuable for anyone.”

Realtime social aggregation first hit its stride with April’s relaunch of FriendFeed as a non-stop ‘waterfall’ of shared content and discussion. With its highly configurable interface, system of Groups for specific topics and the ability to use the service via IM and email, FriendFeed has become an incredibly useful tool for earl-adopters.

However, mainstream use still eludes FriendFeed and if Twingly is aiming at a wide audience from the start, Project Shinobi could be the product that takes real-time to the masses.

Of course, the web world is a fickle one and it may not turn out that way. Still, as grand statements  of intent go Project Shinobi is going to be an interesting one to follow.