Twitter Grows Up, Adds "Promoted Tweets"

CWmike writes "Twitter is finally taking off the training wheels and moving into the world where real businesses tread with the launch on Tuesday of its first advertising model, dubbed 'Promoted Tweets.' The microblogging phenom has long avoided coming up with a business plan or even talking about one. But the time has come for Twitter to figure out how to make money over the long haul. Analyst Dan Old isn't so sure that Twitter users will welcome the change. 'There will be a vocal minority of users who will hate any advertising at all,' Olds said. '[Many] users understand that it's necessary and will accept it as long as it doesn't interfere with their usage. But if the ads look like regular tweets, that could cause some serious outrage from users who feel that Twitter is attempting to deceive them.'"

Comments

freemium

[drDugan]

I would much rather see twitter remain ad free, and charge a fair monthly fee based on number of followers and following; they could charge dynamically: more for companies than individuals, and reduce fees if your tweets are retweeted beyond your local follower network.

Using a revenue model like this would allow Twitter to tweak user behaviors and increase the value of the discussion. It would reduce spam, encouraging insightful and fast information, and remove the incentive for zombie robot following collectives.

Re:freemium

[physicsmichael]

I would much rather see twitter remain ad free, and charge a fair monthly fee based on number of followers and following;

The user base would drop ridiculously fast. Imagine if other social network sites charged to be used.

"Nah man, I didn't see your party on Facebook. I forgot to pay my bill on time"

Re:freemium

[dskzero]

Twitter isn't really based on encouraging insightful. It's based on people screaming in the dark hoping somebody does care about their dinner.

Re:freemium

[winwar]

"The user base would drop ridiculously fast."

Then charging a monthly fee would be an excellent idea.

"Imagine if other social network sites charged to be used."

One can dream.

Re:freemium

[petermgreen]

Between an aversion to paying for things that used to be free, fear of giving out card details and a need to pay in relatively big blocks to keep the card fees manageable a LOT of users will be driven away by a paywall. This has happened many times over the history of the net.

Re:freemium

[grub]

It's based on people screaming in the dark hoping somebody does care about their dinner.

"Twitter: the UDP of human conversation." -me

Re:freemium

[PopeRatzo]

tweak user behaviors and increase the value of the discussion.

Can you elaborate on this, please? I'm interested.

Re:freemium

[blair1q]

I would rather Twitter went into the offices of the CEOs of Sprint, T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon, and says "we want a third of your SMS-fee revenues; and don't raise prices. Otherwise, we'll turn off Twitter."

Those guys would shit their pants and break a nail grabbing for the checkbook.

Re:freemium

[c6gunner]

That's both the funniest and most insightful thing I've read in weeks.

Re:freemium

[Anonymous Coward]

Perfect summary of Twitter. Thank you!

Re:freemium

[Anonymous Coward]

At which point those companies will pass on the check balances to their customers. One way or another, we'll be paying. I'd personally rather have ads because there will always be a way to block them (with the worst case being some browser addon that I would have to install).

Re:freemium

[Anonymous Coward]

i'd wager that most of the users who tweet from mobiles do so with an "all you can eat" text plan or at least some form of a metered plan. The reply from the telco is a simple "most users tweet with 'free' messages, so you get nothing"

Re:freemium

[Anonymous Coward]

What you posted here is a death referendum.

Twitter was pulled off of some sites in Europe because of the immense "SMS" bandwidth fees. SONY could not stop off loading bandwidth when it hit the PSN.

Re:freemium

[Anonymous Coward]

"we want a third of your SMS-fee revenues.."

- Yeah sure - because a third of global SMS usage lands on Twitter? - WTF! They (The CEOs) would shit themselves laughing, then break a toenail booting them out the door. Same argument (albeit in reverse) as Euro ISPs sueing Google because You Tube uses bandwith, with the common theme that both are non-starters.

Re:freemium

[Anonymous Coward]

I would rather Twitter went into the offices of the CEOs of Sprint, T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon, and says "we want a third of your SMS-fee revenues; and don't raise prices. Otherwise, we'll turn off Twitter."

Those guys would shit their pants and break a nail grabbing for the checkbook.

I would RTFT (re-tweet this for truth), but I don't have enough characters.

Re:freemium

[Scrameustache]

Twitter isn't really based on encouraging insightful.

I use it as a democratic fan club. I follow celebrities I like (mythbuster guys, trek alumni, that kind of thing), web comic artists, people who are in the biz I am or who have jobs I'm working to get, and I sometimes reply, sometimes spout off random things.

But mostly, I use it like slashdot, but I get to choose the editors and the commenters. People post links, I follow them.

Re:freemium

[Anonymous Coward]

Many is not a verb.

Re:freemium

[psithurism]

I know one of those users has a 200text/month plan so around the 29th his 1 follower gets:
I have 122 texts left this month...
I have 121 texts left this month...
I have 120 texts left this month...

Who says twitter isn't useful?

Re:freemium

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

You win 100 internets.

Re:freemium

[Khyber]

"At which point those companies will pass on the check balances to their customers."

Did you not read: "and don't raise prices."

They'd see it somehow, either through their own employees that use those networks reporting about the raise in their bills for SMS, or through other means, and they'd just shut it off for mobile phone users.

Mobile screens and browsers are crap for ad displaying, anyways.

Re:freemium

[dn15]

"Nah man, I didn't see your party on Facebook. I forgot to pay my bill on time"

Excellent idea! I'd love to see Facebook start charging so I could use that excuse to skip lame parties!

Re:freemium

[MrCrassic]

I would much rather see twitter remain ad free, and charge a fair monthly fee based on number of followers and following; they could charge dynamically: more for companies than individuals, and reduce fees if your tweets are retweeted beyond your local follower network.

That is totally contrary to one of the main purposes of Twitter, which is to allow anyone to spread information as widely as possible.

The zombie robot bullshit is largely due to their lacking security model. If I had to take a guess from their previous breaches, I'd say that it wasn't designed to be secure from the ground up. Facebook doesn't have nearly as bad of a bot problem as Twitter and myspace.

Re:freemium

[MrCrassic]

Best quote ever. Can I follow your posts?

Re:freemium

[Anonymous Coward]

He's really showing the phone company who's boss by wasting 3 hours in order to cost them a few millionths of a cent.

Re:freemium

[icebraining]

Hand over your geek card. A real geek would write a script to send AT commands.

Re:freemium

[suffe]

I don't actually think that would happen. Granted, I haven't given this _that_ much thought, but I think the price of SMS;s could be loosely modeled as a function of a monopoly. For certain, the prices doesn't follow the regular price structures of a market in competition and it in no way reflects the underlying cost. Thus, assuming monopoly model, the price the carriers are charging are the highest the market will bear and any additional cost will be taken on by the company itself.

Re:freemium

[kramerd]

I would rather Twitter went into the offices of the CEOs of Sprint, T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon, and says "we want a third of your SMS-fee revenues; and don't raise prices. Otherwise, we'll turn off Twitter."

Those guys would shit their pants and break a nail grabbing for the checkbook.

At which point, all of the Ceos will have the exact same reaction:

'How did you get into my office? You want what??!! HAHAHAHAHAHA...no.'

You know why? Because Sprint, T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon can all use their prebudgeted ad time to point out that users will still have access to SMS in order to send pointless messages about the most mundane points of their lives and the ability to blog and send automatic short messages to user groups via SMS every time their blog gets updated, all doable from their phone, without twitter. Im sure the marketing department will come up with a way to sell cell phone specific sets of this, which will add the ability to add users from other cell networks within 6 months, for only (30-20-10-5) dollars per month on top of your bill; all the while acting like this is a favor due to market wishes, and not something any of them could already implement at the drop of a hat. They might even be able to hide the fact that they in fact want twitter to try and fail to monetize because they in fact are already good to go.

Its fairly obvious why you aren't a CEO...

Re:freemium

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that you, Kaiji?
I hardly consider twitter respectful, but even you knock it down a notch.

Re:freemium

[mqduck]

I use it as a democratic fan club.

You're thinking of Digg. They also like Ron Paul.

Re:freemium

[mdwh2]

As opposed to the rest of the Internet, including Slashdot?

Re:freemium

[Anonymous Coward]

No, PSXer, you just did

Re:freemium

[blair1q]

Twitter manages your follower list and performs the fanout of your tweets automatically. And owns the patent on it.

You had SMS before twitter. How many people did you ever contact at once? Do you think Ashton Kutcher typed in 4 million follower addresses on any of his text messages before twitter?

How many "unlimited text" subscriptions do you think there were? I know I had a plan with about 50 texts per month on it. Went unlimited two weeks after following one person. I know I'm not alone. I also know there are a lot of people who can't afford an unlimited plan, but go over the cost compulsively with 15 cent/message fees.

This thing is making $billions for the phone companies. They will share with Twitter, or they will lose 90% of that revenue and be stuck with the old model. The mention of an impending miss on their revenue projections in the press will tank their stock, gutting their annual performance bonus, and open them up to firing by the board.

I'm not a CEO, but I've turned down the job before. If I was the CEO of Twitter, I'd be taking my cut out of the phone companies' income and letting the users continue to get the content for free. No reason the phone co. should be profiting from the value created my invention without paying me for it.

Re:freemium

[kramerd]

Twitter cannot own a patent on sending messages to a group of subscribers through a automated medium. Prior art exists well before email, but even with email the concept of a listserv is not owned by twitter simply because they employ the concept through sms (although if they did, you could get around it by simply sending email messages by using an excel spreadsheet of email addresses and importing the list into an automated emailer by running a script on your blog that sends the list and the message everytime you update. Twitter is uninvolved and owns no patent and due to common use of spreadsheet for performing spreadsheet functions, no one has the ability to patent such).

I believe Ashton Kutcher has never said anything of any importance to 4 million people at once. It's simply a marketing device that allows people to sign up to receive messages. This could very easily be done by having a sign up list on any website to include your phone number and an agreement box to accept sms messages at personal cost. The only impact on the phone company is minor research for actuarial calculations about how users are taking advantage of unlimited use service contracts (they don't give a rat's ass about you using twitter, they care about whether you are sending/receiving 1000 messages a month - (17 mb), or 10M messages a month (167 GB); so long as the price paid for sending all of these messages is less than the price charged for unlimited messaging). This information is available to phone companies because they are the dumb pipe in this equation; twitter is uninvolved. While phone companies (or data transmission groups) do not have the right to control whether or not people choose to tweet, they are not going to pay twitter for the ability to provide the service. Much more imporantly, twitter sure as hell can't stop phone companies from providing sms, phone, or email service to its paying customers, so even if twitter decides to hide behind a paywall (which it has every right to do), it will in no way affect the phone service for which customers pay.

While you could make the argument that the use of twitter has gotten a lot of stupid people to upgrade cell phone service to include sms, it wasn't done with any contracts, and thus not one of them (phone company) will pay for it unless they can get exclusive twitter rights (ie a buy-out of twitter). Since, as I previously mentioned, twitter doesn't have the ability to obtain the patent to prevent competition (by preventing anyone else from creating lists to which things can be sent over sms), which every phone company has a back up method to (immediately) create, this seems like an unreasonable possibility.

AT&T has a P/E of 12+ and stock price is in the mid 20's. They have not made billions this year. EPS is scheduled around 2.20 per share and they have 30 M shares outstanding. Furthermore, RE shows that AT&T made 2.8B between Q4 08 and Q4 09. Meanwhile, one certainly does not attribute its growth entirely (or even materially) to twitter. If it were (which it isn't), then twitter would be responsible for AT&T's general recommendation being a weak buy/hold. Not exactly the exploding growth you seem to think the company is having.

If you were the CEO of twitter, you would probably know a little more about the company, specifically that the its success is almost entirely because it is free, and that trying to blackmail companies that have little to nothing to gain from your existence is a surefire way to be certain that you never go public.

Tweets for twits and infortainment morons...

[irreverant]

Great! ~ they got a business model, it's bad enough I have to read about how twitter finally got paid online, but it's worse when CNN ( a supposed respected news organization ) is reporting on how jim carrey is getting his ass chewed out because he commented on another less interesting tigre woods scandal. Why do we let this crap out in the air waves?! worse, why do we let the people that run this stuff breed?!

Re:Tweets for twits and infortainment morons...

[FooAtWFU]

Why do we let this crap out in the air waves?! worse, why do we let the people that run this stuff breed?!

Because historically speaking, eugenics programs haven't worked out all that well.

since you ask. kthxbye.

Re:Tweets for twits and infortainment morons...

[PopeRatzo]

historically speaking, eugenics programs haven't worked out all that well.

The Mormons have done pretty well.

Re:Tweets for twits and infortainment morons...

[oldhack]

It's increasingly becoming our main economic output, that's why.

Re:Tweets for twits and infortainment morons...

[Jeremy Erwin]

Who's the Kwisatz Haderach? Glenn Beck?

Re:Tweets for twits and infortainment morons...

[timmarhy]

maybe you should try posting some facts, instead of some shit which tries to push all the pop culture buttons?

Re:Tweets for twits and infortainment morons...

[Scrameustache]

CNN ( a supposed respected news organization ) is reporting on how jim carrey is getting his ass chewed out because he commented on another less interesting tigre woods scandal. Why do we let this crap out in the air waves?

Gotta fill out time in-between telling you who threw the ball the most yesterday and who ran the most.

Bread and games are what mainstream news are about, unfortunately.

Re:Tweets for twits and infortainment morons...

[Scrameustache]

Why do we let this crap out in the air waves?! worse, why do we let the people that run this stuff breed?!

Because historically speaking, eugenics programs haven't worked out all that well.

since you ask. kthxbye.

Why do people only ever talk about the sterilization approach to eugenics? What about the "get pretty people drunk and alone in the dark" approach? That's eugenics too, but it's sexy instead of being nasty.

Won't somebody please think of the sweaty aryans?

Re:Tweets for twits and infortainment morons...

[Muad'Dave]

That would be me, you insensitive clod!

Predictable

[DogDude]

Twitter is adding advertisements? Say it ain't true!

I've never heard of a dot-com company before that:
1. Starts with an ungodly amount of free money from investors
2. Becomes very, very popular, all while losing many millions of dollars
3. When the investment money invariably begins to slow down, the company tries to "monetize" a money-losing idea.
4. People hop off to the newest fad, leaving this one to languish and to be used by spammers and people from the Phillipines.
5. The company is bought by some much larger company for a ridiculous amount of money.
6. The large company can't capitalize on the earlier popularity, and the brand dies.

Yawn.

Re:Predictable

[calmofthestorm]

7) Many different imitators crop up, each trying to capture the former userbase, and the circle of life continues.

Re:Predictable

[Trepidity]

People keep funding them though, because sometimes it works. See: Google and Facebook, both of which built very popular, money-losing free services, subsequently slapped ads on them, and are now raking in billions.

Re:Predictable

[Anonymous Coward]

How dare you, wait just one god dam last minute...

Re:Predictable

[jo42]

Most of the business plans I've seen in the last few years go something like that.

1) Do something for free on the Internet.
2) Get lots of people using it, lots of 'eye balls'.
3) Sell to Google (or some other fool with deep pockets).

Re:Predictable

[pablodiazgutierrez]

Interesting, but in this case, the company has become a commodity to the point that 'twitting' is a mainstream verb. That's very valuable in many ways.

Re:Predictable

[Anonymous Coward]

Insightful? Someone has the life cycle of all social networking apps down to a simple 6-step process? Please. I don't use Twitter, but it's obviously an application without precedent and nobody knows where attempts to turn a profit with it will go. I see that someone else here has invoked the "circle of life" to describe what's going on. This is out of control, people. NOBODY KNOWS where this stuff is headed, regardless of how much MORE hip you are than the average geek with a CS PhD, an MBA, and an electric shaver that runs Linux.

Re:Predictable

[bman]

7. ???
8. Profit.

Re:Predictable

[Anonymous Coward]

While I agree with you, I think technically its 'tweeting' which sort of goes against your argument that its a mainstream verb. (Although I guess /. isn't the mainstream so misuse here is okay)

Re:Predictable

[Aliencow]

Facebook is raking in billions? Did I miss something?

Re:Predictable

[Anonymous Coward]

yes.

Re:Predictable

[Trepidity]

Well, not plural billions yet, but estimates of 2010 revenues seem to be a bit over $1b.

Re:Predictable

[DogDude]

"in this case, the company has become a commodity"

So was Napster, and Friendster, and Myspace.

In two years, Twitter will no longer be mainstream. Facebook is already in decline, and will tank once something "better" comes along. The Twitter phenomenon isn't new... it's just the newest version of the same thing.

Re:Predictable

[severoon]

You left off a few steps...

7. ???
8. PROFIT!!!

Re:Predictable

[Aliencow]

Well I am quite surprised, it appears they're going to be profitable for 2010 !

Re:Predictable

[mattack2]

...the company has become a commodity to the point that 'twitting' is a mainstream verb.

Apparently not mainstream enough, because it's actually "tweeting".

(Disclaimer, my anecdotal data points are simply what I've heard people use + the fact that google's suggestions don't have any hits for "twitting", and do for "tweeting". They do have hits for "twittering", however.)

Re:Predictable

[Phurge]

"tweeting"

/spelling Nazi

Re:Predictable

[tlhIngan]

...the company has become a commodity to the point that 'twitting' is a mainstream verb.

Apparently not mainstream enough, because it's actually "tweeting".

(Disclaimer, my anecdotal data points are simply what I've heard people use + the fact that google's suggestions don't have any hits for "twitting", and do for "tweeting". They do have hits for "twittering", however.)

Or those of us who know the preferred term is "tweeting" but refuse to use it. It's called Twitter, and if they wanted people to "tweet" rather than "twit" they had plenty of opportunity to call it "Tweeter". No, they realized that people who'd use their site are twits, but know that if they called them that, people won't use their service.

Ah well, Twitter will soon follow the likes of other fads. Remember it was only a few years ago when second life was the hot thing?

Re:Predictable

[Khyber]

I like how you say "Or some other fool."

Some of the stuff Google has been doing recently has been fairly foolish.

Re:Predictable

[DavidKlemke]

Facebook is already in decline, and will tank once something "better" comes along. The Twitter phenomenon isn't new... it's just the newest version of the same thing.

I think you might be confusing Facebook with MySpace since the former hasn't showed any signs of decline. In fact they've been growing at a fairly consistent rate for the past year or so and are nipping at Google's heels for that number 1 most visited spot on the net. MySpace on the other hand has been in decline for well over a year.

Would you care to cite a few examples of a Twitter-esque service that came before Twitter? The only other microblogging service that's been around almost as long as them (off the top of my head) is Tumblr and even they were launched about a year later. There were of course those engaged in microblogging before such services existed, but Twitter was still arguably the first to market.

Re:Predictable

[Anonymous Coward]

I prefer twatting.

Re:Predictable

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously! This start-up I heard about called Slashdot was running a story on how Twitter is selling promoted twits...ehh tweets. I had already heard all of this on NPR before it was posted on Slashdot. Slashdot is soooo lame. Old-school radio beat them! So much for the imitators. Bye Slashdot.

Re:Predictable

[vegiVamp]

Why is it ranked 93rd ?

Re:Predictable

[pablodiazgutierrez]

Alright, alright, they sound the same to a Spaniard :P.

This is New?

[BJ_Covert_Action]

You mean all those tweets that involved guys talking about how long their penis is weren't Viagra and Extenze ads? Oh dear....

vocal minority?

[Anonymous Coward]

A vocal minority won't like getting bombarded with ads?

You mean most people will like getting ads sent to them?

IMHO, this creates an excellent business opportunity for new companies to expand into twitter's space, or existing larger companies to take it over.

Re:vocal minority?

[Dogtanian]

No, they mean that while most people don't particularly like ads, they'll accept them- as much out of passiveness and lazyness as the understanding that they're funding the site- but that a disproportionately noisy minority will whine and bitch about it, thinking that because they've enjoyed a free and adless service for so long that they're entitled to that forever, rather than being grateful that they got it for nothing for so long.

Re:vocal minority?

[PopeRatzo]

rather than being grateful

"Grateful" is an interesting term to use when discussing the relationship of consumer to corporation.

I should be "grateful" that something I didn't ask for has intruded in my life to the point where many of the websites I visit for news or entertainment have live twitter-fed widgets that take up space but didn't cost me anything, until now that it creates yet another ad stream.

And just how is twitter better than IRC? Besides having the advertisements that I should now be grateful for?

Re:vocal minority?

[clarkkent09]

Grateful has nothing to do with it. If you offer a free service that I like (this SO does not apply to twitter, but speaking in general) I might use it. If you then start charging for it or bugging me in a way that in my opinion outweighs the value I get from it, then I might stop using it. Your business model is up you you but frankly I don't find it particularly ethically superior to offer a "free" service while having full intention in the back of your mind to changing the rules as soon as you got enough people hooked in, compared to just charging for it in the first place.

Re:vocal minority?

[Anonymous Coward]

And just how is twitter better than IRC?

Quote of the decade.

Re:vocal minority?

[lennier]

I've always boggled why something like Twitter is a dotcom rather than a fundamental protocol. It's not adding any content - it's a pure message forwarding service. There's no apparent reason why 'forward short text message from point A to many points B' is something more value-added than 'retrieve HTTP' or 'forward SMTP' and needs to have a corporation managing it. Rather, it seems like a basic service that ISPs should provide. That would take care of the monetisation just fine.

Re:vocal minority?

[lennier]

And just how is twitter better than IRC?>

It's better because a flashy dotcom startup can put themselves into the message loop for everyone on the planet, causing a single centralised point of failure for global communications, and add unwanted noise to your signal, while extracting and salting away millions of dollars in profit, making lots of business transactions less efficient in the process.

Oh, you meant better for the users? It's not at all. But they don't make the venture capital magazines, do they?

Re:vocal minority?

[tompaulco]

A vocal minority won't like getting bombarded with ads?
No, a vocal minority will complain about the ads.


Everyone else will just stop using the service.

Re:vocal minority?

[iONiUM]

are.. are you really comparing twitter to IRC? only on slashdot would someone boil something down to it's most basic function, and then compare it to something else based on that criteria. sometimes developers need to pay a little more attention to the little things, even if it feels irrational.

Re:vocal minority?

[mattack2]

Yeah, that comparison makes no sense. IRC would be a reasonable comparison to AIM or iChat (or whatever other messaging clients/protocols people use).

Re:vocal minority?

[eloki]

If you don't use Twitter then you're not one of the people the GP is referring to. The relationship is between Twitter and Twitter users, not corporation to third party person.

Re:vocal minority?

[MrCrassic]

lol. ISPs in control of Twitter. That'll work great after Comcast gets a hold of it...

Re:vocal minority?

[MrCrassic]

Forgot to mention: the actual web page itself is kind of a last-resort (or super basic) leftover. Many (dare I say most) people use Twitter from clients on their desktop or mobile. It's treated kind of like a protocol sans the RFC.

Re:vocal minority?

[Anonymous Coward]

rather than being grateful

"Grateful" is an interesting term to use when discussing the relationship of consumer to corporation.

I should be "grateful" that something I didn't ask for has intruded in my life to the point where many of the websites I visit for news or entertainment have live twitter-fed widgets that take up space but didn't cost me anything, until now that it creates yet another ad stream.

And just how is twitter better than IRC? Besides having the advertisements that I should now be grateful for?

"And just how is twitter better than IRC? Besides having the advertisements that I should now be grateful for?"

Twitter has Stephen Fry.

Re:vocal minority?

[Homburg]

Actually, IRC strikes me as a pretty good comparison - I started using Twitter when it occurred to me that it was a bit like being able to use IRC with people I would never be able to persuade to install an IRC client. One of the main ways people use IRC is idling in a common channel with a few friends, with people mentioning stuff occasionally as it occurs to them, which sometimes sparks conversation and sometimes just serves to keep you in touch with what your friends are thinking. That's exactly how Twitter works.

Re:vocal minority?

[Anonymous Coward]

And just how is twitter better than IRC? Besides having the advertisements that I should now be grateful for?

Twitter is Web 3.0. and market/capitalist oriented. IRC is old-school like communism and Victorian style knee length bathing suits and shorts. Things need to move forward; the Internet is changing from socialist elitism to being your local neighborhood mall. Ever notice how much better TV got when it was deregulated? The same thing is happening with the Internet, just like Reality TV we'll have a Reality Internet where people can experience things, like in Second Life, almost like they were real.

In the old days people used to download music from usenet "news" and IRC, now you can pay for public domain music through your Apple iTunes account. Buy commercializing what is free we are making the economy strong, and with the implementation of ACTA this will mean that the United States and the corporations that drive the economy and employ us will be strong. Like the CmdrTaco says, Welcome to the now, man!

Re:vocal minority?

[migla]

Indeed. And there's all ready the compatible open source code for it in http://status.net/

But the only good thing about twitter, afaict, is the centralization that allows total strangers worldwide to follow an important topic. Instant reach to whomever it may interest in the world is pretty nifty for raising awareness of shit that affects people.

So, if ISPs got their respective "microblogging" servers, the worldwidedness of it all should be worked out somehow, through some sort of collaboration.

 

Re:vocal minority?

[Anonymous Coward]

"And just how is twitter better than IRC?"

It has nothing to do with IRC. Twitter is broadcast - IRC is conversation (and file downloads ;).

You wouldn't get thousands of celebrities on IRC - they would drown in rubbish from other people. But you can get them on Twitter because they filter and even totally ignore millions.

Now maybe you don't want to know what Kevin Spacey is doing, see updates from Arnold Schwarzenegger, Nathan Fillion, Ashton Kutcher, Conan o'brien, writers and producers, politicians, journalists, websites, newspapers, news organizations but others do.

It mostly likely is the way of the world - in olden days people could read in a magazine about something which happened a few months ago. Today you get live tweets from a journalist who is present.

Google could do well to buy it - its a real time search engine - something somebody is sure to need. Assuming they can find a way to make money from it without annoying everybody away.

Re:vocal minority?

[PopeRatzo]

Twitter is broadcast - IRC is conversation (and file downloads ;).

I didn't ask you how Twitter is different than IRC, I asked how it's better.

Re:vocal minority?

[Dogtanian]

Well, I could argue about semantics and the connotations of "grateful" or how I meant it, but the bottom line was the sense of entitlement that some people have about free services.

Just as the users don't owe Twitter anything for the use of the free, un-advertised service, they have no right to expect this free service to even continue for free, let alone "as is".

Yet, while Twitter aren't continuing entirely "as is", they *are* continuing to have the service for free, making your comment about charging irrelevant or disingenuous.

Yes, I'm well aware that we're paying with our eyeballs when shown advertising, but that's another issue. And the bottom line is that no-one has to continue using Twitter. You "might stop using it"? Fine.

If you get the impression that I like Twitter, or that I'm mad keen on everything "free" being funded through advertising, I'm not- on either count.

However, the criticism is of those who have a sense of entitlement over something they previously paid nothing for- either in money or ad views. It's the same as the unpaid Flickr users who bleated when the Yahoo branding was slapped on the site. Get a grip!

Re:vocal minority?

[Dogtanian]

So, if ISPs got their respective "microblogging" servers, the worldwidedness of it all should be worked out somehow, through some sort of collaboration.

Usenet worked out quite well before it was left behind for centralised forums and seen solely as a source of dodgy binaries.

Re:vocal minority?

[lennier]

only on slashdot would someone boil something down to it's most basic function, and then compare it to something else based on that criteria.

Er, yes? Because that's exactly what science and technology is, and what programmers do? Understand what the basic functions of things is? If learning and saying the truth about how things work makes us social pariahs, then something is wrong with society.

Yes we get frustrated when someone who doesn't understand how either Technology A or Technology B work looks at A and says 'what is this crap', looks at B and says 'oh wow this is amazing', and both A and B are fundamentally the same thing with a different skin and a cooler marketing department but with freedom removed and lots of pointless strings attached.

And yes this cuts both ways: sometimes technologists with a great infrastructure miss that last tiny last-mile bit of connectivity to make an integrated solution. All IRC needed to make it become Twitter was someone to write a web interface and an SMS interface and host it publically.

So nobody did that tiny bit of work to make it usable - but why can't they? Why do we have to depend on an unreliable private corporation as a chokepoint for all our communications WHEN WE ALREADY HAVE THE SAME TECHNOLOGY just missing a few interfaces?

Useless

[Drunkulus]

This thread, and Twitter, is useless without pics.

Re:Useless

[tompaulco]

Agreed. Twitter is doomed to failure. It can only REFERENCE porn, not actually DISPLAY it.

Re:Tweet on this

[Anonymous Coward]

+5 insightful, it's under 140 characters.

What I can't wait to see happen...

[Graymalkin]

I want to see these networks unwittingly replay some of these "promoted Tweets". I want to hear Wolf Blitzer read something like the following: "and here we go to DoritosRGr8 - America is #1 LOL n I hear Obama luvs new Peppermint Ranch Doritos!" It would make my day to have a vacuous twat read some marketroid tweet on live TV.

Re:What I can't wait to see happen...

[Fex303]

It would make my day to have a vacuous twat read some marketroid tweet on live TV.

How exactly would this be different from the rest of their programming?

In other news

[Jamamala]

Slashdot continues to publish Promoted Stories, which could cause some serious outrage from users who feel that CmdrTaco is attempting to deceive them.

I'm confused??

[rueger]

How will I tell the "promoted Tweets" from the everyday Twitter spam?

Re:I'm confused??

[yotto]

According to the article (Yeah I read it) they can delete "Promoted Tweets" that people don't find interesting.

That puts them above about five-nines of the Tweets that aren't Promoted.

Ads In Search Results

[Rantastic]

I find it amusing that they think they have inventing something new here: Ads at the top of search results.

Regardless, as I rarely if ever search for anything on Twitter, I don't expect I'll ever see any ads. The day they start spamming ads into the tweets I'm following is the day I kiss Twitter goodbye.

Re:Tweets

[Anonymous Coward]

http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=28785&cid=3091399

Water my chickens...

[cosm]

I hope the Farmvillle admins' servers are prepared. When people can't microblag their life for free, they resort to obsessive compulsive virtual farming.

Re:Let me get this straight

[Anonymous Coward]

People acting like
arrogant asshats
should not type
like they are
unable to figure
out a textbox
widget.

This discussion makes me thirsty!

[bennomatic]

Time to go to my closest Starbucks for a venti non fat latte. What a great way to round out the afternoon!

They have great snacks there, too, starting at just $1.49! you should try it!

Re:This discussion makes me thirsty!

[Dragoniz3r]

[dragoniz3r@phoenix ~]$ wc -c
Time to go to my closest Starbucks for a venti non fat latte. What a great way to round out the afternoon!

They have great snacks there, too, starting at just $1.49! you should try it!
187

Just sayin.

Re:This discussion makes me thirsty!

[Kenz0r]

You're assuming that advertisers would be held to the same limit as users.
Why would they be? After all, they're paying for that ad space.

Re:This discussion makes me thirsty!

[mattack2]

It's not just a good idea, it's the law... err, a technical limitation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS

Re:This discussion makes me thirsty!

[JaumPaw]

That's only half funny to me (no offense intended here), because, as Cringely put it - it's very logical and it is very likely that it could happen.

See here: http://www.cringely.com/2010/04/why-twitter-is-worth-more-than-facebook-at-least-to-me/

Re:This discussion makes me thirsty!

[Anonymous Coward]

Good idea. All ads must be 141 to 200 characters. That'll let other people easily tell which ones are ad and which one aren't.

taking off the training wheels

[Arancaytar]

We used to call this kind of thing "jumping the shark".

(Or "selling out to the Man", but it's hard to say that with a straight face.)

Darn it!

[93 Escort Wagon]

I guess I'm missing out, having never seen the point in Twitter. But I have seen a few tweets, so I have a pretty good idea of how this might be implemented...

Johnny465: I just ate a delicious pastrami sandwich! Yum! (Brought to you by Jimmy John's)

Sally92: I'm so angry, my boyfriend forgot our date and took a nap instead! (You should try No-Doze)

Joe4ever: I'm in the bathroom right now (Sponsored by Charmin)

Re:Darn it!

[Graff]

No no, that would be:

Joe4ever: I'm in the bathroom right now (Brought to you by Carl's Jr.)

Re:Let me get this straight

[Anonymous Coward]

Burma-Shave

Ironic - I can share this on Twitter

[Gothmolly]

So if I send this to Twitter, does it create another Slashvertisement front page post, causing a Möbius loop of FAIL ?

Hmm

[Andorin]

This doesn't really affect me as I hardly ever search Twitter. The rare exception is when I want to follow someone and don't already know their username. I also use Twitter from a client instead of my browser- and on that note, TFA mentions that they may be adding support for Promoted Tweets to appear in third-party clients in the future, which makes me unhappy. I'm only following a handful of people (mostly friends and maybe two well-known/famous people) and if I started getting ads in my tweet roster from corporations I don't care about, I'd abandon Twitter in a heartbeat.

However, although I dislike advertising, this doesn't seem so bad. Only one Promoted Tweet per page, and only in search results, it's clearly marked as an ad, and they have to meet a popularity threshold in order to stay. If all online ads were like that, I'd be less inclined to block them.

Re:Hmm

[Phil06]

Searching Twitter is useless, any trending topic is going to be loaded with spam posts. If there was a way to exclude anything with a link I would use it. 99.9% of all messaging links (email, chat, tweet) are spam yet nobody seems to notice. When was the last time you clicked on a link from your "bank"?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Use the API against them.

[sethstorm]

Just block them and/or report them as spam.

Or just use a client that disregards the ads.

Re:Use the API against them.

[DavidKlemke]

Whilst I'm sure there will be something like AdBlock for Twitter I can imagine them making the terms of use for the API so that doing so would be a violation of their TOS. Considering that many of the clients are ad supported already (and Twitter has mentioned that there might be a revenue sharing arrangement in the works) the larger majority would comply with the new ads, lest they get blocked and overtaken by another client that does.

Re:Use the API against them.

[sethstorm]

Then the users will just flock towards a client that offers blocking and gets around pesky API keys.

Just like slashdot, google, and everyone else..

[Improv]

We'll have tools that will hide the adverts, and do our best to make them widespread.

Here's the magic formula ...

[tomhudson]

... if they REALLY wanted it to grow up AND make money, here's a simple one-liner:

s/promoted/porn/gi;

People really would be "all a-twitter about twitter."

@pr0n1: "Tweet me, honeybuns!"
@pr0n1: ""(Cheesy music)"
@pr0n1: "Oh, that feels SOOOO good."
@pr0n2: "who's your daddy NOW, b*tch?"
@pronAdserver "K-Y lube - up close and personal!"

Re:Here's the magic formula ...

[Obfuscant]

s/promoted/porn/gi;

What, twitter doesn't promote porn? The first three followers I got, almost immediately after signing on, were twitter-hos begging me to come visit them.

Re:Here's the magic formula ...

[bsDaemon]

i wrote a daemonized twitterbot in Ruby a couple of weeks ago to scan posts for key words and respond to relevant ones with "that's what she said"... sort of on the same lines, I guess.

Re:Let me get this straight

[Mashiki]

Drink your Ovaltine.

Oh hell yes.

[MrCrassic]

This will take off like wildfire. The Starbucks example is a great description of how it will do so. Twitter is already a great medium for finding underground discounts for stuff, but Promoted Tweets take it to a whole new level. Yes, there will be businesses that will abuse the living hell out of it, but its potential is enormous.

Of course, I have to include a retort against the Twitter haters. It is perfectly fine to not own a Twitter, Facebook, MySpace or whatever account. Nobody is holding you at gunpoint demanding that you expand your social media presence and/or build your social network. (Yes, these are official marketing terms. How quaint.) However, if you take a step back and see Twitter, Facebook or whatever from a more holistic perspective, you might see the amount of good that comes from these services.

Yes, there are buckets (many, many, MANY buckets) of people that post useless status updates to feed their delusions of grandeur or self-importance. Personally, reading my "friends'" status updates is almost always a huge waste of time. (Today's snippet: Look at my new shades! Wow, big pizza! I'm back home from work, tired! Sadly, the last one is oh so damn common.) However, (real, unbiased) news spreads like bacteria on Twitter, and there are lots of promotions, offers and even events that are exclusive to only Twitter users. Facebook is leaps and bounds more effective for planning events or reconnecting with old friends. It's also good for finding others who share similar interests, which can lead to bigger and better things (or at least an expanded worldview). It also makes for a great restricted blog or photo storage location.

Naturally, none of this matters if your social circle doesn't use these tools or if you just have no friends.

Re:Oh hell yes.

[Anonymous Coward]

[..] or if you just have no friends.

HOW DARE YOU !

phenom

[Hognoxious]

Not found. Did you mean phoneme?

Re:Let me get this straight

[Hognoxious]

Worst haiku ever
The winter of my disgust
is registered

Re:Let me get this straight

[selven]

Worst haiku ever
The winter of my disgust
is registered

Even worse haiku
The syllables don't even match up
Burma Shave

Corporations already advertise on twitter

[thegiorgio]

Corporations already advertise on twitter, for free! Look at nike plus twitter feed http://twitter.com/Nikeplus
They make proper use of channels too so it's already targeted ads!

May that infernal bird be devoured...

[knarf]

Good! Splendid! If this means that infernal twitterbird gets removed from all those sites it has been showing up I'd say have them plaster all their twittertwatter with Re: herbal v14gr4 poker gambling ads 'till the cows come home.

Twitter is a bad idea. It might fit in the attention-span deficient, Idol-aspiring 5 minutes of fame ideal of a dumbed-down happy consumer society but I don't want that fork of the decision tree to become the set future. There is still time to change track.

Throw the switch! Kill the bird! Stamp it down!

Next on the menu: Holler, the new twitter! Scream out loud to all the world!

Re:Let me get this straight

[silverglade00]

It's a crummy commercial!

Cancelled my account

[Anonymous Coward]

Goodbye twitter. Anyone have a competitor?

I lol'd

[GameboyRMH]

Parent deserves +5 Funny and +5 Insightful!

Easy enough to work around.

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox add-on to silently delete 'promoted' tweets in five.. four.. three..

Twitter SUX

[Anonymous Coward]

Just another reason why twitter SUX!!!!

Oh look, another selling of selling business model

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Big surprise. Twitter going to sell ads. Who would have guessed that.

Just once, I'd like to see a "web 2.0" company come up with a business model that does not depend on either: selling the attention of their users to the highest bidder, selling information about their users, or selling the ability for customers to try to sell things to their users.

Re:Let me get this straight

[Devout_IPUite]

These fools write haiku, Like children in summer time. They don't understand. 5,7,5. Season Reference. It needs BOTH.

Re:Let me get this straight

[Hognoxious]

5, 7, 5 huh?
Yours is 5, 7, 22.
Spring off a cliff.

Re:Let me get this straight

[Devout_IPUite]

(spring is only one syllable)

Formatting is hard
Forget the HTML
and it will not grow

These fools write haiku,
Like children in summer time.
They don't understand.

5,7,5. Season Reference. It needs BOTH.

Re:Let me get this straight

[Hognoxious]

spring is only one syllable

Not in Scotland.

5,7,5. Season Reference. It needs BOTH.

Wrong. 5,7,5 is the maximum. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_in_English

Re:Let me get this straight

[Devout_IPUite]

o_O You scottish people need to figure out a way to write spring with more vowels.