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.

Context-insensitive ads

AdSense has a lot of cool aspects to it, such as openness to even the smallest blog and some amount of customizability. AdSense ads are context-sensitive, based on what Google knows about the page, and thus supposed to be relevant to the consumer visiting the page. However, context sensitivity is not enough to ensure the ads are appropriate.
Any completely automated system just follow rules. Consider the following ill-advised or just plain wrong ad placements:

• Tummy flattening ads for a site on pregnancy
• Snake ads on a Monty Python site
• Gun sales on a site about the ten-most-wanted criminal watch
• Similarly, babysitting services on a site about child porn or pedophilia
• Coke ads on a page about plant life extinction ("Coke adds life", don't you know?)

That being said, I bet there's a lot of interesting, even appropriate, placements that the advertisers wouldn't have thought of that AdSense might. Can anybody think of some? Or have you seen a bad ad placement? Please let me know!