Lifestyle content network Glam Media has launched Tinker, a Twitter-style platform tailored to journalists, bloggers and PR professionals.
Crucially, Glam also claims Tinker is "the first safe monetization model for brand advertisers" seeking exposure in the microblogging space. In tandem with Tinker, a Tinker Micro-Blogger Network was released.
Tinker aggregates conversations on specific topics or events being discussed on Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook, among other brands. This way, users can track beats relevant to them without sifting through the irrelevant data, occasionally inappropriate commentary and navel-gazing so prevalent on the original sites.
Examples of topics include industry conferences, social conversations (such as when fans watch the premier of a new show concurrently), or microblogging users that want to gather for something specific, like fundraisers or strikes.
Because of its focus on "curated event conversations," Tinker is a "safe microblogging solution for brands to advertise on," gushed CEO Samir Arora of Glam.
Marketing, tech and ad industry practitioners have been known to use Twitter to "liveTweet" events, an activity that can result in hundreds of thousands of concurrent updates in a few minutes. Frequent outages during high-traffic events have been a chronic problem for the site, which has grown 1382% year over year, according to Nielsen Online.
Ironically, Tinker has been down most of today — its first day live. In lieu of an image like Twitter's FailWhale, which appears every time the site is down and has managed to penetrate pop culture, Glam's Tinker promotes brand and event names currently being discussed. They include Comic-Con, Coachella, Lost (the TV show) and the Nickelodeon Kid's Choice Awards.
Events are divided into categories: Awards, Causes, Conferences, Fashion, Festivals, Movies, Music, News, Politics, Sports and TV. Users can create "conversation streams" to curate incoming data from other participants; user-created groups can be either public or private.
The Tinker Micro-Blogger Network includes what Glam calls a "Micro-Payments Platform." When a user's event is viewed, the service calculates posts and pageviews, then provides compensation based on a micro-revenue sharing model with content creators.
To maximize the exposure of a given Tinker group, users are welcome to build applications or widgets to promote the most recent posts about their events. The service, as well as select group streams, will be distributed through the Glam and Brash Distribution and Partner Network, which serves over 100 million unique visitors per month, the company claims.
Presently, Twitter is working on a similar topic-curating platform. It recently partnered with Federated Media to launch an ad-supported event called MarchTweetness.
