If you’ve spent any appreciable amount of time on Twitter, the term “TweetUp” should be pretty familiar to you. In Twitterspeak, it means a gathering of all connected tweeters in a particular city – not on Twitter, but in actual three dimensional space (hard to believe people still like to interact with each other in the flesh, isn’t it?). But as of this week, “TweetUp” has new meaning now that a new service has emerged which has chosen the term as its namesake.

It’s being widely billed as a Google for tweets, so it should come as no surprise when I tell you that it’s essentially a search engine for Twitter with a twist. That twist being that 1) it uses an algorithm to find the “best” and “most relevant” tweets for a given search, which will be displayed at the top of the results, and 2) it will allow users to pay to be listed at the top of the results for a given TweetUp search.

So first of all, it’s designed to help you search Twitter without having to sift the through piles of garbage tweets you and I see every day. This sounds great in theory, but I have to admit, saying that one of its searches displays the “best” results sounds like an awfully subjective judgment for something that uses an algorithm to determine what’s best. The algorithm seems to analyze the “authority” of a Twitter user who sends a particular tweet, along with metrics from URL shortening outfits like bit.ly to determine what’s best and most relevant.

But the other, and more important aspect is the idea of sponsored results. As you might have guessed, this is a Google Adwords type model, and indeed those who pay to have their tweets (or their Twitter profile itself) appear atop certain search results will bid on the keywords in conjunction with which they would like their tweets to appear. Now, being an avid tweeter and just generally aware of social media marketing, I can see many companies being interested in this type of thing. As for individual tweeters, I’m not so sure there will be much interest. But I guess anyone looking to “build their brand” through social media, whether it’s a company of 500+ or just a freelance professional, might be intrigued by the prospect.

In addition, TweetUp has deals in place with Twitter application developers like Seesmic, which will use the TweetUp’s search in their applications.

The natural question to me here is not who will pay for this service (at least in the short term), it’s – will it have any effect on those searching Twitter. Because TweetUp offers this pay model, in addition to its natural search offering, users may end up encountering not the best and most relevant tweets related to their search, but rather tweets that might not be related at all. Further, even if they are relevant, they may not be anything you’d really want to read.

And in all honesty, I don’t know how often users really even search Twitter. Very rarely do I myself search, and if I do, it’s usually just clicking on a hashtag that’s popped up in my Twitter feed. Plus, obviously I can still use Twitter’s normal search function if I really want to find certain content-specific tweets.

I guess like anything else it comes down to how well the service functions. If it truly plugs a whole that Twitter users have been looking to fill, then I’d expect it to be at least a relative success. But if it’s just a whole bunch of paid tweets that don’t offer the quality users are expecting, then I’m not so sure. I can’t say it enough – content is king, my friends. So I guess I’ll just have to give it a shot and decide.