Thursday, November 6, 2008

Twitter Spam

BeAMagpie.com is the first business that I have found to figure out a way to use Twitter for ads. The money model, interspersing ads into your tweet stream, isn't original, but I haven't seen anyone else actually do it yet.

I like the way it gets set up: people set their own keywords, and then get ads based on their use of those keywords in their tweets and the number of followers they have. At regular intervals BeAMagpie will insert a tweet in your stream that all your followers see. Simple enough, and gives control to both the user and the advertiser.

However, I really don't like the idea of forcing others to see ads when there is no opt-in. True, they are always allowed to opt-out by blocking your feed, but then you've both lost a friend.

I'm curious to see how people react to these sorts of streams. I'm guessing it will be successful, but I'm not sure I'm glad.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think Twitter is a very powerful network, at least in part because of its openness to third party apps.

As long as the "rules of the game" are properly crafted, the openness of Twitter to third party apps, has the potential to take Twitter to unpredictable heights. This thing might become very powerful.

On a practical level, let these tools proliferate, as long as the rules allow me to block somebody or something from ruining my experience.

Julie DeKoven said...

I agree. Tools are cool. Openness is cool, in general.

The question as you so rightly put it are the "rules", along with the (non-existent) "enforcers". The problem is that there are very few levels in terms of blocking someone. At least on Facebook you can individually control applications vs. people. In the case of Magpie, there is no way to distinguish one from the other. Perhaps if Magpie were to put a keyword in each post, and Twitter allowed you to block any post with certain keywords, I wouldn't worry so much because I, as a recipient of the Magpie ads, would be in control of my own advertising experience.