Silicon Valley entrepreneur Bill Gross, the man who pioneered paid search, has launched a new business aiming to do the same for Twitter.
He has launched a public beta of keyword-based bidding marketplace TweetUp, in an attempt to capitalize on Twitter's rapid growth.
The site was funded through $3.5 million in venture capital from investors including Index Ventures, betaworks and Revolution LLC, All Things Digital said.
Gross says TweetUp will operate in a similar fashion to Overture/GoTo.com, the web's first paid search system that he developed.
Advertisers will be able to bid on popular keywords in a similar fashion to Google's AdWords service.
The search engine will also attempt to sort tweets by relevance, with the most important messages being at the top.
"Twitter has such tremendous potential as a real-time information network far beyond what has been realized to date,” Gross said.
“For most people, though, 80% or more of the tweets that fly by them when they're searching for something are useless noise. For serious tweeters, the task of attracting interested and relevant followers is equally daunting. TweetUp will change all of that.”
TweetUp has already reached revenue sharing agreements with Twitter clients including multi-platform client Seesmic and Android client Twitdroid, aggregator TwitterFeed and web sites such as Answers.com, BusinessInsider.com and PopURLs.