"I think we all suffer from this feeling of missing out on our feeds while we're in a meeting for a couple of hours," Gray says. "In my view, we launched on mobile first because that where the feeling is most acute."
The real-time web has gained momentum since the company launched in 2008, and the need to organize it has intensified. It's not just on the tiny screens of mobile phones where items that appear on streams seem to disappear immediately. According to Gray, My6Sense is working on an aggressive roadmap to take its service to more mobile devices, more browsers and more platforms. The Chrome extension for Twitter is just the tip of the iceberg.
"Any site that delivers content via stream should be prioritized," Gray says.
Joining the Effort to Organize Content Streams
My6Sense isn't the only company with this opinion on prioritization. The Facebook news feed now has prioritization elements, and in August, Google launched its Priority Inbox for Gmail to sort important mail.
A startup called Sanebox had launched the priority mail concept long before Google did, joining a long list of startups with similar foci.
Major sites will never aggregate themselves for prioritization in the same way that My6Sense aggregates them with its apps, but what if the sites that the company wants to help prioritize decide to prioritize themselves? Even if more sites do add this feature, My6Sense isn't worried that this will close the need for its product.
"Prioritization is not a feature," Gray says.
Monetization Possibilities
In fact, the desire that other sites have expressed in prioritizing their content is a key part of one potential revenue stream that My6Sense has been exploring. They could use an SaaS model and create co-branded products for other companies to use on their sites.
Another option they have is to use information gathered about people's preferences for advertising purposes. The company hasn't committed to any of these strategies, instead focusing on acquiring users.
"The company is just getting started," Gray says.
Photos courtesy of Flickr, Violinha, Perspicacious, aresauburn
Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark