Nuffnang founders Churpy about Twitter

• Nuffnang founders launch Churp Churp
• A Twitter advertising network
• Operations in Singapore and Malaysia
  

Malaysia - Nuffnang founders, Timothy Tiah and Cheo Ming Shen, have launched the beta version of Churp Churp, a new Twitter advertising network service for Malaysia and Singapore.

The company, which is not part of its blog advertising network business Nuffnang, launched this morning just after 9 with a tweet which according to Tiah has resulted in over 100 users signed up at press time.

"Let's say you're an agency looking to create buzz for a client's event. What you do is you give us the brief and then we can pass it to the twitterers and they can word for word [spread the message across]," Tiah said.

"That's the less desirable way," he said.

The other option is the more "social media way" where Churp Churp gives twitterers the brief and they decide if the event is something for their followers and spread the message in their own words.

"You can have a lot of people talking about your particular campaign or product at the same time. The cool thing about it is if you don't restrict them to sending generic tweets and let them tweet in their own way, you almost instantly kick of f a viral effect and people start re-tweeting one another and replying," Tiah said.

At this beta stage, no advertisers have signed up yet and twitterers on Churp Churp will get paid based on followers.

How companies should monetise the Twitter phenomenon has been a growing topic for some time now. In Asia, the service has grown in popularity to the point where a recently released list of Asia's Top 50 people ranked by Twitter followers included 11 different countries.

But Tiah said blogging in Malaysia is still more popular "despite the hype" and he did not agree that his new Churp Churp service could take away revenue from bloggers on Nuffnang as Twitter possibly continued to grow in popularity.

"I don't think so," he said.

"They are two different mediums and they each have their own advantages."

Churp Churp shares the same founders as Nuffnang but is a separate operation and Tiah says he's sure "people will say Nuffnang are trying to commercialise everything."

"No negative feedback so far - there's been a bit of debate and people saying if I see you pushing an ad I am going to stop following you but that is what people were saying about blog advertising - look where we are now," Tiah said.

He believes you don't stop following someone on Twitter because of advertising - "you stop following if you find him uninteresting," he said.