Friday, May 21, 2010

TweetUp Racks Up Keyword Bids, Connects With Conduit

Pasadena-based TweetUp, the Twitter advertising startup backed by Idealab and headed by Bill Gross, said Thursday afternoon that the firm has now registered 75,000 keywords, and also inked a deal with Conduit. The firm said those keywords represent users with over 9 million followers, although the firm did not say what that translated into actual users. TweetUp said it had also inked a deal with Conduit, a developer of web toolbar software, so that Conduit's web publishers can offer up TweetUp driven search fields in their toolbars. Gross launched TweetUp in April with backing from Index Ventures, betaworks, Revolution LLC, First Round Capital, Jason Calacanis, and Jeff Jarvis. The site allows Twitter users to "bid" for keywords when people are searching for Twitter content on other web sites and search services, which places their own tweets higher in search results.