Glam Media Launches First Real-Time App Network

by Gavin O'Malley, Sep 23, 2009, 7:00 AM

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Media and advertising network Glam Media has launched a network of applications to help marketers make better use of real-time social media.

The Tinker Apps Network will attempt to leverage Glam Media's display advertising and publisher services network, which presently serves roughly 1,400 sites.

"Creators of real-time applications are looking for monetization models that are contextual and relevant to the social conversation, without being disruptive," said Raj Narayan, co-founder and VP of engineering for Glam Media.

Launch partners for the Tinker Apps Network include: Digsby, a product which helps people manage their social media accounts, including Twitter, from one application; Tiny Chat for video and text chat; TweetBurn, a Twitter news and tips site; Twibes for Twitter groups; Twistori for charting the "emotional pulse" of Twitter; TwitScoop, a Twitter trends discovery service; and TwitterMoms, which tweets by topic from and for moms.

Earlier this year, Glam launched its micro-blogger platform Tinker.com, which places a focus on events rather than individuals by collecting and sorting real-time conversations and comments from Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed users.

Tinker users can follow events sorted by various themes -- celebrity, news, food, music, movies -- or choose to create their own categories. Perhaps more intriguing, Tinker is also monetizing the micro-blogging experience by placing display advertising alongside particular event comment streams.

Advertisers are already running Tinker stream ads along with IAB-standard ad units wrapped around real-time media streams throughout the Glam Publisher Network, according to the company.

Other ad products to be launched later this year include TinkerVision, which allows a brand to visualize where related tweets are originating, and Tinker140Plus, which matches the form factor of a Twitter post -- 140 characters long, and able to include text links.

Tinker.com, meanwhile, provides contextual, real-time ads for brands, and is currently running more than 50 million ad streams a month across 1,400 sites in the network.

Tinker stream ads are based on aggregated and filtered live Tweets, status updates, comments and other posts from a variety of social conversation platforms, including Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed.

Glam Media Labs launched Tinker in March to facilitate the aggregation, live moderation and distribution of real-time conversations from social media platforms including Twitter and Facebook.

Glam is not the first media company to experiment with micro-blogging services like Twitter, which have yet to establish solid revenue streams.

Rival ad network Federated Media recently began working with Twitter to combine conversations and comments, and then getting brands to sponsor the threads. ExecTweets, for example, is a collection of tweets from executives, and is sponsored by Microsoft. MarchTweetness was dedicated to the March Madness basketball tournament, and was sponsored by AT&T.

Earlier this week, Glam announced that, as of this month, its flagship U.S. women's division is profitable.

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