Twitter-based advertising platform TweetUp has announced this morning that it has acquired all of Tomatic’s current projects, which include both popurls and twidroyd.
The acquisition will provide TweetUp with both a new platform to distribute its sponsored search results as well as a new source of relevant search results.
TweetUp (not to be confused with a “tweetup”, which is a real-life meeting of Twitter users) is a search and advertising service for Twitter that lets users bid to make their tweets appear higher in TweetUp searches. According to the site, it “combines sophisticated relevance algorithms with a bidding system to raise your profile to the top of search results and make it easy for you to acquire new followers”.
If you’re unfamiliar, popurls does what it sounds like – it provides a listing of the most popular URLs from across the Web, from social link aggregators Digg and Reddit to Flickr and yours truly. In its own words, popurls “is the dashboard for the latest web-buzz, a single page that encapsulates up-to-the-minute headlines from the most popular sites on the Internet”.
Twidroyd, renamed from “Twidroid” to avoid any legal issues with Lucas Films, is one of the top Twitter clients for the Android mobile platform and “will come standard on millions of upcoming Android phones from five of the leading handset manufacturers”, according to today’s release.
TweetUp CEO Bill Gross had the following to say in the release:
Acquiring Twidroyd provides TweetUp with a number of strategic advantages. Twidroyd is widely considered the best Twitter client for Android phones and it leads In market share, so its growing base of users will be a valuable source of well-informed feedback on TweetUp search on mobile devices. In addition, the popurls website, which attracts users looking for a convenient guide to the most popular sites, news, videos and blogs on the Internet, will be a natural spot to display TweetUp search results and gain user feedback. This combination should enable us to more rapidly refine our offerings, generating better user experiences for distribution partners and for users searching for the world’s best tweeters regardless of their choice of devices.
The details of the acquisition were not disclosed in today’s release. The company claims that today’s deal “will bring TweetUp search results to more than 40 million unique users per month and serve more than 100 million impressions per month.”
