VentureBeat

As a growing number of companies turn to Twitter search to monitor what the public is saying or to build conversation-watching products, the microblogging startup’s search limitations have become all too apparent.

For one, you can’t search beyond 100 pages or about 10 days’ worth of tweets, so it’s difficult to archive searches over a long time. Or if too many people tweet about a topic like ‘Coke’ every minute, some tweets will not show up every time an application pulls data from the network. A one-man project called Tweethook is trying to solve this problem by using webhooks, which is a technique to “jailbreak” web apps and have them post information as it happens.

The Apex, N.C.-based company is targeting businesses that want to do brand monitoring as well as developers creating Twitter clients who can’t handle the search load themselves. It charges $6 a month for five continuous searches or up to $400 for 500 continuous searches. There are custom plans as well, and founder Chad Etzel plans to introduce services designed for conferences where hundreds of attendees might be tweeting constantly about the event.

Etzel, who worked at Cisco Systems and also part-time for Twitter to support the developer community, came up with the idea after building another Twitter search client called TweetGrid. A friend asked to get Twitter search results delivered to his Web site without writing a section of code to constantly poll Twitter’s search application programming interface. At the time there wasn’t, so Etzel decided to build it himself. He’s the only full-time employee and is self-funding the project.

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Tags: co:tweethook, people:chad-etzel, tweethook