TweetMart: Classifieds For & From Twitter

Written by Jolie O'Dell / July 28, 2009 8:50 AM / 3 Comments

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A project that's been available to the public for just two months, TweetMart allows users to see items for sale and jobs in a Twitter-friendly format. Its co-founders "felt there needed to be a drop dead simple way to integrate a classifieds site with Twitter," according to the site.

Listings can be created on the site, although many are culled from Twitter posts, as well. Quick, simple, and free, TweetMart is still in the early stages of development but presents a great deal of potential for organizing the user-to-user - or even B2C - commercial use of Twitter.

Co-founder Will Kern wrote us today to explain how the site started and how it works. "The product launched with just the ability to list and tweet items for sale, but I quickly followed that up with the ability for recruiters and employers to post and tweet jobs," he said.

"I quickly recognized a huge potential in aggregating items being tweeted for sale on Twitter and jobs being posted on Twitter. I quickly followed that up with a release that pinged the Twitter search API and aggregated all items listed for sale and jobs being posted."

Kern also told us that the most recent releases of the app included OAuth support and the addition of "on sale" tweets.

In concept, the site is similar to iList Micro, a Twitter-oriented subdomain of iList that launched earlier this year.

Although listings can be spam-heavy in highly competitive areas such as real estate or content-light for categories such as art or event tickets, one can imagine that as Tweetmart's search of Twitter's unwitting classifieds improves, so will the site's content and usefulness.

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Comments

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Jolie,
Thanks so much for the write up! We are constantly looking at ways to improve the site and have some exciting things planned for future releases, so keep an eye out.

Cheers,
Will

Posted by: Will | July 28, 2009 10:19 AM

I quite like the idea behind TweetMart.

While I'm sure there's a big base of potential users with enough Twitter followers, for a person like myself with a few friends and family members on Twitter it does not make sense to advertise. For someone like myself, it would be nice to be able to follow a TweetMart Twitter account that exclusively tweeted, say, jobs in the publishing industry, or another that only tweeted books for sale. In the same vein, it would be very useful to be able to advertise through those specifically targeted accounts to people who had willingly followed them. I'd be totally addicted to that service.

Still, nice to have another source where I can easily find aggregated classifieds. I'm really interested to see where TweetMart will go!

Posted by: oakese | July 28, 2009 6:16 PM

@oakese,
Thanks so much for the comment. To address your request about being able to follow a particular category say within jobs, that is on our list of features to implement. We recognized that people may want to just target a specific category or two, so be on the lookout for this.
Thanks,
Will

Posted by: Will | July 29, 2009 6:30 AM