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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.'"
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.
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.
I don't respond to AC's.
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.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
How will I tell the "promoted Tweets" from the everyday Twitter spam?
Three Squirrels
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.
I hope the Farmvillle admins' servers are prepared. When people can't microblag their life for free, they resort to obsessive compulsive virtual farming.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
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!
The CB App. What's your 20?
Because historically speaking, eugenics programs haven't worked out all that well.
since you ask. kthxbye.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
The Mormons have done pretty well.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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)
#DeleteChrome
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.
"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?
You are welcome on my lawn.
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?
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.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
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?
It's increasingly becoming our main economic output, that's why.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
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.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
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.
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?
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
We'll have tools that will hide the adverts, and do our best to make them widespread.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
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.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
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.
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?
You can't take the sky from me...
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.
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.
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!
--frank[at]unternet.org
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.
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?
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC