Tinker is whole new way to find, follow, create and share real-time conversations on events and breaking news.
This killer idea started in a small team at Glam Media, while working with publishers and advertisers that wanted to have a better way to use the power of micro-blogging on Twitter for events and breaking news.
The core idea started with the question: “Wouldn’t it be cool, if there was a way to follow events in addition to people?”
The core team on Tinker was Ryan Roslansky, Raj Narayan and Bonni Evenson that got together in a room in Silicon Valley with me and started to brainstorm this revolutionary new idea. As in any creative process to envision new ideas, this was an amazing time! Emmanuel, Madlena, Adam, Greg, Yogesh, Sasha, Cece, Dianna, Jody, and others from Glam joined in and helped create Tinker.
In 2005, Glam was one of the first companies to recognize the value of Blogs and launched the first Blog Publishers Network. We saw Twitter as the next platform for micro-blogging and news in need of a way to make it easier for users and safe for advertisers.
One of the first people that helped spark the idea was Peter Sachse, CMO and President of Macys.com: he asked for a better way to help advertisers reach people that were reading newspapers online for news on events that Macy’s was hosting. It struck us that there really wasn’t a place you could go on the web to browse events like movies, theater and music before they launched, like we do using Newspapers.
Fred Wilson, one of the smartest VC’s and an early investor in Twitter wrote a post on Event Firehoses http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2008/02/event-firehoses.html
: the team was well along building the project code named “gWire” when we read this post and were incredibly excited about an external user asking for what we wanted to create before launch!
With the explosion of the use of Twitter, I also raised the question of breaking news with the team. How do you create a way for journalists and editors to build news sources and monetize their efforts.
Lastly, with the inauguration of our new President Obama, CNN hosted a live video feed with Facebook Connect that was another important step for us in building a vision for a service that could be used to cover live events.
Today, we are very excited about launching the first version of Tinker.com. Congratulations to the team– Ryan, Raj, Bonni, Emmanuel ,Matthew for countless hours of work with the extended team at Tinker! Thanks to the team at Twitter for creating a revolutionary platform we can build on!
We hope you love it and tell us how you would like to see it evolve.
Samir Arora
CEO, Glam Media
OnTinker @samirarora
Twitter @samirarora
Very interesting concept and site. One quick note: your most followed topic, Web 2.0 Expo, is I think using a hashtag which is not the official one for the Event. It would be ideal to use #w2e rather than #web2expo. Thanks for advancing the twitter–event frontier, something I have been writing about recently at http://www.conferencebitesblog.com .
-Brian Duggan
Thanks for the heads up Brian! We’ve gone ahead and changed the hashtag as suggested.