San Francisco — Like an ancient puzzle, the acumen to making money from Internet social media has obsessed, and frustrated, Web entrepreneurs for years. Paid search advertising innovator Bill Gross, uncovered a goldmine on Monday that aims to make money by allowing people using Twitter to bid on key words to give their posts top ranking.
Similarly, at Twitter a new service called TweetUp, will allow users of the microblogging site to arrange the posts according to their popularity as measured by how often readers repost them and click on links they contain.
“This advanced collection of components raises the best tweets to the top of the results of users’ searches, allowing them to find the most compelling tweeters, and it enables serious tweeters to expand their following quickly and cost-effectively,” says TweetUp.
Gross, along with his tech company Idealab, said he has 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.
With USD3.5m in Venture Capital funding, from investors such as Index Ventures and Revolution, headed by Steve Case, formerly of AOL Time Warner, Gross is launching a public beta of TweetUp, according to a New York Times.
Gross express that this concept will be helpful, as information is often difficult to find on the social networking site. “We feel Twitter is unbelievably powerful, but finding the thoughtful tweets amid all the noise is unbelievably hard,” he said. “What we are bringing is a new sort-order to tweets.”
The idea is to cut through the jumble of thousands of irrelevant posts on topics of interest and keep the useful ones from disappearing into a torrent of messages.
The risk is whether Twitter users who have turned the microblogging service into global communications phenomenon will be willing to pay to get their 140-character messages noticed — and whether other Twitter users will view such paid placement as legitimate.
Twitter is also trying to monetize itself with an upcoming ad system and new acquisitions, such as its acquisition of Apple’s iPhone client Tweetie.