Tinker: sanitized Twitter for advertisers, money-maker for micro-bloggers

Popular microblogging services like Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed will let you find and follow friends, celebrities, and anyone else who interests you. But Glam Media wants to let you follow events, too. It’s just launched  Tinker.com, a micro-blogging platform that collects real-time conversations from Twitter Facebook and Friendfeed and sorts them by subject. Tinker users can select events that interest them from a predefined list — including options for sports events, TV shows, and breaking news — or they can create their own events.

It’s a somewhat more ambitious effort than the one launched recently by Glam competitor Federated Media, which is helping Twitter find ways to monetize its traffic with things like ExecTweets and MarchTweetness.

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Tinker doesn’t just help users follow topics they’re interested in; it also gives advertisers the chance to advertise within a microblogged conversation based on that conversation’s content. And Glam says it’s making the opportunity a safer one for advertisers by giving them filters and controls to make sure their brands don’t appear next to harmful or inappropriate content.

Tinker will consist of conversations from professional microbloggers (journalists and bloggers from several well-known networks including Federated Media, BlogHer, TotalBeauty and others are openly invited to join) as well as from regular users. Advertisers can use their filters to keep their ads out of conversations by users they don’t trust. Volunteers chosen by Glam will also be able to flag conversations as offensive or inappropriate.

And there’s an incentive for professional microbloggers to take up Tinker’s invitation to join what it calls its “Tinker Micro-Blogging Network”. Glam will calculate posts and page views and offer micro-revenue sharing with content creators. This is a first, to my knowledge. “TwitterMoms” is one of the first such networks.

The company said it launched the service today with over 100,000 posts by more than 25,000 people on 200 events in popular categories including Awards, Causes, Conferences, Fashion, Festivals, Movies, Music, News, Politics, Sports and TV. Techcrunch, which is also reporting the news, has a nice chart showing where some of the activity is. Below, you’ll see that the streams around the shows American Idol and Lost are the most popular so far.

Events can be private, with invites and permission required to join the conversation, or public social events, where anyone can connect and participate. Tinker has created something called Tinker Trends, which lets users see top events and breaking news and chart which events are rising and growing socially in popularity.

Tinker also lets users create widgets so that they can share Tinker conversations on their web sites or blogs. It packages ads on these shared widgets so that publishers and distributors can share in the revenues.