The latest venture to come from Idealab, the new startup is launched by veteran technology entrepreneur Bill Gross and it is expected to make money from Twitter’s unbridled stream of 600 tweets per second.
Gross stated: "We are building a better search engine for tweets and tweeters."
The developer scheduled the launch so it would be just in time to capture interest from attendees of Twitter’s first-ever developer conference, called Chirp, in San Francisco, with an expected attendance of 800 the first day and over 1200 the next day.
TweetUp.com is expected to repeat the success of the lab’s first project, Goto.com, which introduced the concept of paid Internet searches and became a key business model for companies like Yahoo Inc. and Google.
According to Gross the idea behind TweetUp is that Twitter members who want to get their messages noticed can bid on keywords that will help distinguish their tweets from the rest. "Anyone who wants to build a bigger following who is an expert at some subject, whether it’s baseball, whether it’s tsunamis, whether it’s the iPad, this is going to allow them to find their audience extremely cost-effectively," he said.
TweetUp offers a 50-50 revenue split to Web sites that incorporate the TweetUp search, which will include BusinessInsider.com, Answers.com and PopURLs.
Investors of the new startup include Revolution LLC and noted Silicon Valley angel investor Ron Conway.