To grow, Twitter looks to wider web and outside developers SAN FRANCISCO: For Twitter to justify the high valuation of its stock, the micro-messaging company must spread the gospel of tweeting far beyond its current active user base of 232 million accounts. To do that, Twitter is counting on millions of websites to link to the service and encouraging legions of independent developers to find creative new uses for its platform, driving up activity and the number of advertisements that Twitter users see. Joe Budzienski, co-founder of Gozaik, is among the developers trying to innovate on top of Twitters core service. His startup has developed a system that scans Twitters half-billion messages a day for job listings posted by employers, indexes them and makes them easy for job seekers to search. It also builds profiles of Twitter users, based on publicly available information, that employers can look at to find candidates. According to Gozaiks analysis, 15 jobs are listed on Twitter every minute - roughly 150,000 a week. One thing that is constant chatter on Twitter is jobs, Budzienski said. But matching those ads to potential employees is a challenge amid the cacophony that is the Twitter stream. So besides the search engine on its own site, Gozaik is developing an advertising tool that will let employers send job-related messages to specific users on Twitter who match their profile of an ideal candidate. The system, which is still in testing, delivers the ads through Twitters existing real-time bidding platform. If it works, it could lead to more job ads on Twitter and help the company tap into the robust market for employer services that has made LinkedIns career-oriented social network so profitable. We believe that one thing we can bring to Twitter is an entire new ecosystem, an entire new source of revenue, said Budzienski, adding that his companys experimentation has been approved by Twitter, which is allowing Gozaik to have free access to all users tweets. Other startups, such as Tame and Nuzzel, are trying to improve on the shortcomings of Twitters design, which presents messages in reverse chronological order, regardless of significance. Tame, a German company founded with financial support from the national government, has built an alternative interface. Its tool, which costs 5 euros a month, analyzes a users feed and sorts posts into three columns - links, topics and people - based primarily on how frequently they are being mentioned. If, for example, lots of people are discussing the latest revelations of spying by the National Security Agency, those posts would bubble to the top. Users can also choose to examine their pool of tweets over one to 24 hours, offering a quick way to catch up on the top messages over that time. We believe something is important if lots of people talk about it, said Torsten Mueller, Tames co-founder and chief marketing officer, who is temporarily working in an incubator space in the same building as Twitters headquarters here. We offer you this instant analysis. Twitter declined to make any executives available for this article. However, the company generally supports this kind of innovation. It offers a host of free tools for outside sites and developers, including Twitter Cards, which allow publishers, e-commerce sites and mobile applications to extend a 140-character tweet by adding photos, previews of articles and catalog items, or links to mobile apps.
Posted on: Mon, 11 Nov 2013 09:20:44 +0000
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