“Adsense for Twitter” startup TweetUp launches, demos ranked search, analytics

After making itself available to early adopter advertisers for the past month, the Twitter search and advertising startup TweetUp officially launched today at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference.

In our previous coverage, we described TweetUp as a sort of AdSense for Twitter. The company has developed an algorithm that ranks quality tweets, and it also allows users to bid on specific tweets so that they remain at the top of search results.

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During the demonstration today, CEO Bill Gross expanded further on what the startup will offer. He showed off TweetUp’s search offering, which will initially be integrated in the Twitter widgets, or “Twidgets”, on sites like TechCrunch and Business Insider. It will eventually be integrated into Twitter clients like Tweetdeck and Seesmic. Since this is the initial release of its search feature, it’s currently limited to showing high-profile Twitter users in search results, and doesn’t yet include tweets that users bid on, since bids aren’t active yet on the site.

Gross also offered a brief glimpse at the company’s analytics feature, which will let users see exactly where people are reading their tweets (it can show specific clients, for example), the number of people who’ve read the tweets, and an aggregate of followers reached from different sources.

The company previously landed $3.5 million in funding led by Index Ventures. Other investors include Betaworks, First Round Capital, Steve Case, Ron Conway, Jeff Jarvis, and Jason Calacanis.