How Tinker Makes Twitter More Useful
By Anna Johnson on April 2nd, 2009Tinker is a new service just launched by Glam Media which allows you to keep track of Twitter posts about the same topic or ‘event’. Basically you input some keywords that describe an ‘event’ and then, in real time, Tinker starts streaming all the micro-blog posts about that event.
For example, let’s say a UFO lands on Tahiti. You head over to Tinker, create an event based on some appropriate keywords e.g. ‘Tahiti UFO’ and then Tinker will start displaying a stream of tweets about that Tahiti UFO.
Right now, regular Tinker users can create their own events and search one phrase at a time. ‘Trusted’ users – such as those running an event, can access more advanced features and be able to run multiple queries in a stream.
Once you create an event you can also share the event feed via widgets which you can place on your website or blog. You can also submit your own messages to Twitter via the widget.
Hopefully you can see how useful Tinker might be in terms of (a) tracking specific topic-related Twitter conversations and (b) displaying interesting, real-time content to your website audience.
However, that’s not all. Tinker also features an interactive graph that shows you, visually, how ‘hot’ is a given event compared with another event in the Tinker system.
So you’ll be able to see, for example, how much tweet-time a given Internet marketing launch gets vis-a-vis another. Wouldn’t that be interesting?
You can tinker with Tinker here: Tinker
Source: Jason Kincaid, “Tinker Gives Twitter Its Long Awaited Events Firehose,” TechCrunch, March 30, 2009
