• TechCrunch, Tuesday, March 31, 2009 1:30 PM

"As its popularity has skyrocketed, Twitter has quickly become an indispensable tool for nearly any event," says TechCrunch's Jason Kincaid. But thus far, Twitter has lacked a tool that could help users understand an event more comprehensively, something that would enable them to input a bucket of keywords to follow that event.

Glam Media is launching just such a tool. Called Tinker, Kincaid describes the service as "a persistent search for multiple keywords" on Twitter. Each event is associated with terms that Tinker then searches for across all tweets, presenting the results in a single stream. Kincaid uses March Madness as an example of a Tinker Event. The resulting Twitter stream might include terms like "NCAA," "Basketball" and "Final Four."

Currently, most people rely on Twitter search and hashtags to keep tabs on these events, "but these aren't particularly efficient or user friendly," Kincaid says. Thus far, there have been Twitter pages created for big events like The Oscars, but nothing to monitor smaller events or breaking news stories. Tinker aims to solve that problem, allowing users (and companies) to build their own pages in seconds.

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