Glam media is launching a new service called tinker that lets users create customized events feeds from twitter.
Over a year ago Fred Wilson wrote
about the need for a Twitter events firehose - a place where users could input a handful of keywords collectively referred to as an ‘event’, which could be used to monitor current news as it happens in near real-time. Tomorrow morning, he’ll get his wish when Glam Media launches a new service called Tinker to the public.
At a high level, each Tinker event can be described as a persistent search for multiple keywords on Twitter. Each Event is associated with one or more terms, which Tinker then searches for across all Tweets and presents in a single stream. For example, a Tinker Event for March Madness might present tweets that included the terms ‘NCAA’, ‘Basketball’, and ‘Final Four’.
At launch Tinker is going to allow normal users to create their own ‘Events’, but they’ll only be able to search for one key word, hashtag, or phrase at a time (they can also choose terms that they’d like to exclude). Trusted partners, such as those that are running an event, will be able to access a more robust interface, where they can include multiple queries in a stream (normal users will eventually be able to use the same functionality). And while these queries are currently limited to Twitter and FriendFeed for now, it wouldn’t be surprising if we saw Tinker open up to monitoring other services in the future.
While a service like this looks interesting on the face of it, it doesn’t really fall into glam’s core focus of fashion. So I am note sure why glam would get into this area.