Slashdot Mirror
Twitter To Block Third-Party Paid Tweets
tekgoblin writes "Today Twitter announced on its blog an upcoming change to its Terms of Service. The change will not allow anyone to promote paid tweets through the Twitter API. Twitter had announced previously that it will be releasing a 'Promoted Tweets' platform for advertisers that will be non-intrusive and will always be relevant to the Twitter timeline. This action taken by Twitter could be a hard hit for small publishers that relied on the paid tweets that will be blocked shortly. Depending on how expensive the Twitter Promoted Tweets will be, this will show us whether or not Promoted Tweets will be good for the little guy."
Unconstitutional!
LUL
Damping absorbs vibrations. Dampening is caused by moisture.
And here, the competition sleeps with the failwhale.
Of course Twitter isn't going to allow advertisers to use their API for free. They will muzzle any attempts to do so in the name of preventing spam, then turn around and charge them for the privilege.
Just read that A new paid tweet service was launched in japan.
A company wants to make money! I'm starting an online petition!
it's under construction
This action taken by Twitter could be a hard hit for small publishers that relied on the paid tweets
If you "rely" on "paid tweets," go fuck yourself and find an actual business model. Seriously.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
In order to continue to provide clarity, our guiding principles include:
1. We don't seek to control what users tweet. And users own their own tweets.
So users are still free to tweet "Blue Sun makes the BEST saddles in the verse! #blueSun #spaceHorse" and receive payment from Blue Sun, but apps can't display ads in the feed that aren't coming from twitter?
Meh, fine by me.
You can't take the sky from me...
I don't know why, either, but that's because I don't really understand it. I even skimmed the parts of the Twitter post, and still don't get it because it uses too much new age business gobbledygook terminology - e.g.,
Could somebody describe the situation in terms that me, a simple software engineer, understands? What constitutes a paid tweet, and how does it function -- are they usually automated, based on subscriber count, etc.? What the fuck is the twitter timeline? I'm assuming by ecosystem, they mean their servers and network connections, but someone correct me if I got my hippie==>legitimate terminology translation wrong.
Well, marketers deserve neither pity nor mercy, nor acceptance in civilized company. However, that doesn't really change the (potentially invidious) little business cycle of our time:
Thanks to network effects, the bigger the player the more valuable the property(architecturally, making your own Twitter, with blackjack, and hookers, and slightly more characters per message would be trivial. Getting anybody to care would be an uphill slog. Same goes for something like Facebook.) Thanks to the ever more nuanced access control, cryptographic restriction, and analytics schemes available, the incumbent is in an excellent position to extract rents. Rent-seeking is generally a bad thing for everyone who isn't the rentier.
Now, I'm hard-pressed to shed a tear for the poor would-be twit-marketing millionaires who will be sucked dry by this; but the strong incentives to build structures from which rents can easily be extracted has its downsides. On the services side, outfits strive for lock-in; both in data portability issues, and in not integrating well with third parties, reducing effective customer choice. On the hardware side, we see the dangerous trend toward the manufacturer retaining cryptographic control over the device in perpetuity, and extracting fees for the privilege of doing various things(like selling software for the platform, or being able to play multiplayer games on your own hardware, with your own internet connection, that were once simply part of owning a computer).
The marketers might be the first to bleed(and they will, given their professional specialization in noise-making, certainly be the loudest); but they will not be the last.
Pooping. Poop is coming out now.
This tweet brought to you by Ex-Lax. Helping you to "go", when the going gets tough.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
"That" and "which" are not interchangeable.
Agreed, but the summary could have also used parenthesis to denote precedence.
((This action taken by Twitter could be a hard hit for small publishers) that relied on the paid tweets) that will be blocked shortly.
OR a complete rewrite to eliminate passive voice.
"This will hurt spammers."
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
So what is a "paid Tweet"?
If Barack Obama tweets about politics, and he is paid to be the President of the USA, is that a "paid tweet"?
Some twitter viewing applications slide ads into people's twitter streams. Now that Twitter is introducing an official paid advertising service that slides ads into people's twitter streams, they want control over that revenue stream.
All of the incomprehensible corporate speak is smoke-and-mirrors. Sadly, it will be smoke and mirrors that lots of people will fall for. I've shown junk like this to rather intelligent friends, who then nodded and said "that makes sense." The fact that they actually agreed with it was only slightly less shocking than the fact that they survived the experience without their BS detectors exploding.
The ______ Agenda
And anyone uses them?
>It is critical that the core experience of real-time introductions and information is protected for the user and with an eye toward long-term success for all advertisers, users and the Twitter ecosystem. For this reason, aside from Promoted Tweets, we will not allow any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API.
In terms that a software engineer can understand, it means that Twitter has hired Dogbert Consulting.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Handy Translation guide:
critical to the core experience = critical to our pocketbooks
real-time introductions and information protected for the user = Marketing content limited to what we are paid for, for our monetary benefit
long-term success for all advertisers = Advertisers that pay us are the only ones whose ads show up
Twitter Ecosystem = The users who visit the site and click on our ads
inject paid tweets = Ads introduced by third party software makers / web sites syndicating tweets, by displaying on the same page as the tweets.
timeline = Twitter's facility for displaying multiple tweets about a subject or from a person, over a period of time
Twitter API = An interface to their proprietary system provided for third-party access, to display and send tweets