Twitter Ads?

Twitter has a delicious problem on its hand. It needs money, well, at least the investors want money. The problem is that they aren't making any yet. But it's so easy to taste so many ways they could. Their current challenge is to choose one (or so).

What concerns me is the impact their model could have on the consumers. For instance, Jason Calacanis (CEO of Mahalo), posted a few ideas. Two of them, at least, had to do with ads. He opines that people wouldn't mind getting a sponsored tweet every so often. While his final advice to Twitter is spot-on ("An absolute idiot with 10-20M users can make a ton of money. So, get to tens of millions of users and forget about money."), I was left wondering about the "intermittent ad" proposal in general.

Imagine getting a sponsored message every so often in your:

• Your Twitter feed
• Your email
• Your phone calls or answering service
• Your mail

How often (e.g. every 200 messages, once a day, ...) would you be willing to get a sponsored ad if it kept the service free? In what ways would you be willing to get more ads in exchange for free premium services?

Consumer experience

Over the past 15 years or so, I have had a lot of experience thinking about user experience (UX or UE). In brief, experience engineering has to do with the user’s entire experience with the product: how it is perceived, how it is used, how it is adopted, adapted and abandoned. This blog is about the ad consumer experience, which merely means how the person consuming an ad (the 'user') relates to the ad - how they perceive it, how they figure it out, how they use it, and so on. The image to the left from Peter Morville gives one way of breaking down the field in the context of information architecture. There is a lot on the subject, such as these articles on Experience Design, Human Factors and Usability Engineering. Classics in this area also include the Nielsen Norman Group and the US government site on Usability.

But, does anybody know any sites dealing directly with the ad consumer experience? There are plenty of one-off articles, like this one, that are good but could stand some solid grounding in UX. There has to be more out there... any one?