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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.'"
Twitter isn't really based on encouraging insightful. It's based on people screaming in the dark hoping somebody does care about their dinner.
Oblivion Awaits
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.
Ask Slashdot: Where bad ideas meet poor googling skills.
So if I send this to Twitter, does it create another Slashvertisement front page post, causing a Möbius loop of FAIL ?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
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.
That Anonymous Coward guy is pretty annoying. Can we have the government censor him or something?
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.
Just block them and/or report them as spam.
Or just use a client that disregards the ads.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
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.
Many is not a verb.
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.
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.