Twitter has become one of the most effective ways to catch and track breaking news in real-time. It also has become an invaluable resource for tracking chatter on major events, from conferences to the NCAA Basketball Tournament.
The problem has been that there has been no single place to easily track the chatter on Twitter. Hashtags, Twitter searches, and Twitter apps like monitter all have some functionality, but aren't comprehensive approaches to event tracking.
Today however, Glam Media, a popular advertising and publishing network, has launched its solution to the event tracking problem. Dubbed Tinker, it's both a social media service that makes it easy to track specific trends and news, and also a fully-fledged Twitter Web interface that has a monetization model for brand advertisers.
Tinker for the User
Tinker starts by having you "follow" specific events or lists. Everything from SXSW to American Idol are trackable trends. Tinker does the heavy lifting of finding keywords or hashtags related to the event and streaming that information to your Tinker account. It also shows how many users are following a specific event and how much discussion there is around it. Users are welcome to add events to track.
Tinker also has trend tracking, with charts that make it very clear which event generated the most buzz and specifies the difference between people Tinkering about the event and general discussion.
Users can tweet from Tinker if a user is looking at a specific event and the system will add in the proper hashtag or keywords and then let the user fill in the rest. Glam Media's Tinker is a fleshed-out and effective system for anyone in media or tech that likes to track multiple news and trend items.
Tinker for Brands and Media
The other interesting part of Tinker is its monetization model, specifically its Micro-Publishers Network and its Micro-Payments Platform. Most existing members of the Glam publishing network are automatically part of the Tinker network. The goal is to monetize Twitter trends and tweets based on them.
Essentially when users view specific events on Tinker, it calculates (based on pageviews and posts) and shares the revenue with Glam Media publishing partners. Seem unclear? It is - the model has yet to be fully fleshed out, but a few top Twitter users seem to be part of this network, including TwitterMoms. Tinker also has traditional advertising and "featured events," the latter of which can target specific keywords and has a "safe" function that assure that negative or inflammatory tweets don't appear in featured events.