Why You Should Tinker with Tinker

According to TC, Glam Media launches a new service today called Tinker. I’m sure you’ve seen your Twitter stream flooded with random #hashtags that mean nothing to you. Eventually, you may pick up on what #sxsw or #journchat means, but usually it’s just a little confusing. What Tinker does is provide a method to view Twitter and FriendFeed conversations about a specific “event” without having to know anything about hash tags, keywords, or Twitter search.

The Users/Partners

Tinker lets you put together a persistent search based on a set of keywords. For instance, an event for the Spelman CS Olympiad might include the words “Spelman”, “Computer Science”, and “Black”. Tinker will basically reach across Twitter and grab all the tweets with those terms, presenting them in a single simple stream for you to follow. It also appears that you can update your Twitter status right from the Tinker page.

For now, Tinker is only letting the average user build a stream around one keyword. If you’re running some type of official event, you may be able to become a trusted partner. This would allow you to build more detailed streams using multiple keywords and searches. Eventually, we should all have access to this more advanced interface.

The Viewer

How cool would it be to just go to a website, pick an event or topic you’re interested in, and follow the conversation around it? No need to remember what hash tags you need to search for or anything. Tinker could also serve as a way to discover new events since you wouldn’t need prior knowledge that something was taking place.

Tinker will also be providing widgets that cover each specific event. This would make it easy for an event coordinator to incorporate live conversation about their event into their website. This also makes it simple for advertisers to pair relevant ads with this subset of Tweets. One of the issues in monetizing a Twitter stream is that it’s usually pretty random. Having a way to eliminate the “noise” and narrow the stream to a specific topic basically eliminates this hurdle, although I’m sure some of the “noise” will always slip through.

The Conclusion

Contrary to popular belief, I’m not really into using hash tags and such, but I might if it was easier to figure out what to use when and which tags were for what. I could definitely see myself jumping into Twitter discussions based around specific topics of interest. How about you? Do you think Tinker could become the place for Twitter events?