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Michael Langford believes he can get his wife and his mother to start using Twitter.
Just two weeks ago, he launched Tweetworks LLC and its site, Tweetworks.com, a Twitter mashup that contextualizes posts on the popular social network, by organizing its short messages into groups and threads.
Langford has no tech background. He is president of Course Pilot Financial LLC, a small wealth management firm in Westborough.
When he started using Twitter this spring, Langford discovered a problem many Twitter users had already noted. Twitter, created by San Francisco-based Twitter Inc., allows users to publicly post short messages in answer to the question, “What are you doing?” Those posts sometimes turn into conversations — everything from users sharing related links, to reporters and bloggers throwing out questions to a mass audience.
“I’d see something that looked like an interesting component of a conversation, but I’d have to keep clicking to the next, to the next, to the next to find out, ‘Well who’s he talking to and what’s going on?’” Langford said.
Out of his own pocket, he paid programmers to write code that would grab Twitter messages on their way in. If messages come in as replies to another post, Tweetworks links them in a thread. Members can also create private or public groups focused on a specific company, sports team or any other topic.
De-contextualization is a problem common to many social networks and messaging services, said Lawrence Grumer, managing director at Technology Associates and Alliances Corp., a technology capitalization consultancy based in Boston and Rochester, N.Y. “Putting threads together in conversations — especially conversations with multiple users — is very cool, and very necessary,” he said. “If you can get some graphics and some visualization that associates with that, that’s great. It can really help map out group organizations.”
This month, Langford plans to launch two strategies to monetize Tweetworks. The first will provide a premium subscription service aimed at the enterprise, which will allow full management rights for private groups. At least two companies have already targeted the business market for short-message networking: California-based Yammer.com and Washington, D.C.-based Intridea Inc., with its present.ly application.
A second money strategy will allow advertisers to sponsor groups. The advertiser’s name will appear next to the group headline, and their tweets will appear “mildly” highlighted on the page, Langford said.
If that’s going to succeed, Langford will need to apply some automation that responds to keywords or topics, like search ads sold by Google Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG) do, Grumer said. “If you have to arrange sponsorships for things, then it becomes more of a direct sell and it’s very hard to do,” he said. “There needs to be an automated process.”
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