• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, May 7, 2009

Next week, Twitmatic.com will release a real-time search engine that allows people to find and share videos from links tweeted on Twitter. The clips pull from MySpace, YouTube and other video sites -- about 300 sources total.

The data structure of Twitmatic.com allows parent company ffwd -- which designed the technology -- to take a slice of time and identify the most relevant videos tweeted on Twitter. Eventually, the technology will break it down into subsets of friends tweeting on Twitter, and then people who have the same interests, according to Patrick Koppula, CEO and co-founder at ffwd (pronounced "fast forward"), the site's parent company.

The site also allows people to view videos without searching on specific topics. Think stream-of-consciousness. Clips are viewable as people tweet the links on Twitter. The new tool enables people to search on any keyword to tap the stream-of-consciousness and store the searches on videos recently shared. "While most links tweeted on Twitter are to Web pages and text, the share to videos is growing," Koppula said. "It's one thing to say a tweet is indexed, but another to identify its relevance to real time."

Twitmatic.com launched last month, but the technology has been in the works for about a year. The video that connect to tweeted links also will become searchable on engines such as Google, according to Koppula, who argues that Google bought YouTube for the search data, not the videos. YouTube recently added a share-to-Twitter button as an option on video pages.

Search traffic generates about 30% of conversions from longer sessions. The opportunity for revenue could come in paid insertions. Koppula said the site will generate revenue by capitalizing on average viewing times -- which average six minutes -- but jump to as much as five hours. This is enough time for brands to drop a 30-second spot on the site without pissing off viewers. With longer sessions, he said, Twitmatic.com can move from cost per impressions (CPMs) to cost per engagement (CPEs) model.

Built on the Facebook platform, ffwd also released a new application at the Digital Hollywood conference Thursday that helps celebrities, fans, and companies make it easier for people to discover video content through social networks. The app imports existing Web video collections housed on servers across the Web into a Facebook Group or page.

The promise of real-time search engine indexing has Twitter making changes, too. Twitter Search, which today searches only the text of Twitter posts, will soon crawl links in tweets and index the content of those pages, reports CNet.com. Rafe Needleman, who moderated the panel "TweetUp with Twitter & LinkedIn" for TiEcon2009 Wednesday night, has learned through Twitter's new VP of Operations, Santosh Jayaram, that search will become a bigger part of the company's strategy.

Apparently, Twitter will also build in a "reputation ranking" system for searches done on a trending topic. The microblogging site will take into consideration the reputation of each person who wrote the tweets and, in part, based on that rank search results.