Advertising company Glam Media is launching Tinker.com, an application that helps advertisers engage with the real-time conversations on social services like Facebook and Twitter. It showed off the new application at the DEMOfall 09 conference today.
Not only does Tinker.com help advertisers search and browse conversations on those sites, it lets them create their own topics and events. The goal is to give them a broader picture of the conversation, rather than getting mired in individual comments.
Samir Arora, chief executive of Glam, showed off the app on stage today in his fifth appearance at the conference. He showed how you can monetize real-time conversations via Tinker.com widgets. With Tinker.com, you take the real-time feeds related to a live event such as the DEMOfall 09 feed shown in the picture. An ad is embedded into the page so that whoever hosts the Tinker.com can make money from the widget. The widget can display real-time posts, Tweets, or photos on the event or given topic.
But you won’t just get a bunch of mindless Tweets showing up on the widget’s display, which is embedded within a publisher’s web site. A publisher can apply filters to the event’s Twitter posts, allowing posts only from certain recognized Tweeters or certain credible fans. Arora said that it makes sense to filter and curate the Tweets to present only the best ones, much the way that Glam does with its various media properties that post articles. Publishers can start embedding the Tinker.com widget in their sites today.
