Bill Gross recently unveiled a new venture called TweetUp, designed to improve Twitters search engine abilities while also capitalizing on companies who want their Tweets to be read first.
The new platform works in a somewhat similar fashion to Google search and ads: A user types in a search phrase and comes up with the most relevant tweets available on their query along with a series of ads that companies will pay to have pop up at the top of the page.
Gross suggests that his new venture will be incredibly useful to Twitter users who have a hard time sorting through all the noise to find the Tweets that are most relevant to what theyre interested in.
The search engine that could find more relevant Tweets would probably be extremely popular but the question is whether it will remain so with the added feature of paid ranked advertisements. If users dont accept the paid ad placement as legitimate, the new search engine may not be nearly as popular as Gross is counting on.
So far, however, TweetUp is raising capital quickly from investors like Index Ventures and Revolution: $3.5 million to date. Part of the confidence is based on the quality of the algorithm TweetUp uses to sort relevant (non-paid) Tweets, which Gross considers to be as high a quality as Googles fabled algorithm for ranking the relevance of the Webs contents at large.
Peter Koeppel is Founder and President of Koeppel Direct, leading in DRTV direct response television and infomercial campaign management industry. With a Wharton MBA and over 25 years of marketing and advertising experience