by Biloxi Von Lutz

Created on: July 20, 2010

Twitter has taken the world by storm over the past couple of years. What started as a small, novel concept has turned into a worldwide service with millions of users. But, that vast network of users comes at a price. 80% of the tweets on Twitter are just noise, with no real relevance to anyone but a select few. All those random tweets make it particularly hard for people to find the information their looking for.

TweetUp aims to solve this problem.

TweetUp is, at its core, a search platform for Twitter. It uses a proprietary algorithm to weed through all the nonsense and bring you the most relevant results for your search query. More recent tweets are given a higher priority, then the algorithm is used to determine if older tweets are more relevant and should be featured higher up in the results. This is in contrast to Twitter's own search engine which just searches for keywords and ranks them chronologically.

TweetUp is also one of the first services to provide an option for monetizing Twitter . They offer a service where advertisers can "bid up" their results. An advertiser selects certain keywords that pertain to their site or product and then place a bid for their twitter feed to show up when one of those keywords is searched for. The more an advertiser bids for a particular keyword, the higher their twitter feed will appear in the results. These will appear in addition to the traditional results from a search and allows sites to pay to drive more traffic to their feed.

TweetUp also has an API that allows advertisers to add a TweetUp feed directly to their site. This will earn money in much the same way that Google Adsense does. TweetUp will split any revenue from this API 50/50 with advertisers who host it on their sites. This will help keep advertisers interested in the service and make sure it remains viable when Twitter inevitably tries to compete with it.

The future bodes well for TweetUp. It's the brainchild of Idealab, the company that essentially invented search engine marketing in the late 1990's, so it has a history of past success to rely on. The company has also recently purchased TwiDroyd, a popular Twitter client for Android devices, which will help TweetUp integrate into the Twitter community at large. Although still in relative infancy, TweetUp has the potential to become the foremost advertising and search client on Twitter.

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