TweetUp is the Search Adverting Model for Tweets
By Azam on April 12, 2010
TweetUp aims to provide relevant search results on Twitter using ad words. If this sounds familiar, It is because Bill Gross who pioneered search advertising is behind TweetUp. Besides being a serial entrepreneur, Bill Gross started GoTo.com and later renamed Overture that pioneered search advertising model that has become the highly profitable business model of Google. Google has taken the model so successfully dominates the Internet search market with very high margin that supports the entire Google machine. Bill Gross is looking to replicate the success on the real time conversation on Twitter through search results on TweetUp.
TweetUp will rank Twitter post on relevance based on popularity, reposting, and click through on links they contain. The idea is to limit the noise involved in numerous and superfluous tweet s with little correlation to interest of users.
Bill Gross came up with the idea while attending TED conference and following the tweets on the conference and finding a few of interest. Bill Gross came up with the idea to create a way to find the best tweets and get lost on the deluge of tweets that follow that are mainly irrelevant. Another incident, Bill Gross posted a thoughtful blog piece on global warming based on the Copenhagen conference that was lost in the stream of tweets
In Bill Gross own words:
“We feel Twitter is unbelievably powerful, but finding the thoughtful tweets amid all the noise is unbelievably hard,” said Mr. Gross, founder of Idealab, a technology company incubator based in Pasadena, Calif. “What we’re bringing is a new sort-order to tweets.”
Paid Model
The key word is paid by users that want to increase their ranking in results of searched terms on TweetUp. Individuals can bid on key words or phrases, like “iPad” or “solar energy,” to move their Twitter profile or posts up to the top of TweetUp’s rankings results . Bids will begin at 1 cent and people will pay each time their profile or a post shows up in a search. Gross stressed that bids were not required to appear in search results.
TweetUp uses Klout to calculate rankings based on an algorithm to measures a Twitter user’s influence. Also , the popular Bit.ly used to shorten urls will provide data on how often people click on a link in a post.
Parters
Mr. Gross said he had signed deals with other outside Twitter services like Seesmic, TwitterFeed and Twidroid to display TweetUp’s rankings. A TweetUp search bar will appear on Web sites like Answers.com and BusinessInsider.com. TweetUp will split revenue evenly with each partner, he said.
Tags : AOL, Bill Gross, Danny Rimer, GoTo.com, Idea Labs, Index Ventures, Overature, Revolution, Seesmic, Steve Case, TED, TweetUp, twitter, yahoo