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Twitter Sells "Trending Topics" To Advertisers
destinyland writes "Twitter's 'Promoted Tweets' platform already allows advertisers to insert ads directly into its users' Twitter feeds. But advertisers will soon also be able to purchase spaces in the 'Trending Topics' area of Twitter. The space reserved for tracking topics seeing the most discussion will be sold for 'thousands of dollars a day,' according to advertisers who've been approached by Twitter, and while it could be a real cash cow for the service, some users argue that Twitter 'risks ruining the site if it lets the pursuit of profit interfere with the organic nature of the social network.'"
I believe the difference here is that, instead of a site monitoring which pages people are visiting, Twitter would be monitoring the user comments. While it's ridiculous to assume privacy through Twitter (since it's designed specifically to spread information), it still FEELS wrong.
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
The Internet has always had the reputation of being "free", when it never has been. In the past it was supported by academic and government (military) sources whose realized value in the either the free flow of information and/or an uninterpretable flow of information. It has since moved on to be maintained by businesses that what want to generate revenue from supporting it. There's nothing inherently evil in this, they provide a service and you pay for it one way or another. It used to be in taxes, tuition, etc... now it's in subscriptions, advertising hits, etc. The problem is the myth that the internet is "free" is still very much ingrained and people will use all sorts of sites and provide a ridiculous amount of information without ever stopping to thing that these sites are (generally) not run out of charity and will extract their pound of flesh in some manner.
If they're going to sell ads, why not sell ads that look like ads? Why do they have to mess around with insinuating them into the service?
I mean, I pay nothing to post on Twitter. Put an ad in the corner. I promise not to run away.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
I don' use twitter in any way, but I think I saw it's usefulness during the protests in Iran.
Imagine Twitter with Free code and a non-profit, donations based model. Surely humankind could set that up, everyone paying what they can. It should work, IMO. I'd pay some :s, just as soon as I can muster any income and a bank account. I expect the finances being open and any monetary need (for hosting or whatever) addressed swiftly by the haves of the community.
Incidentally, half the work has all ready been done: http://identi.ca/ and http://status.net/
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
Twitter has been manipulating their trending topics for a while now. In the past they've added big live events like sports contests to their trending topics when, in my analysis, those topics simply weren't trending. How do I know? I spent some time trying to build a long-term trending topics list using the public_timeline feeds. There were obvious items there that were underrepresented in the actual tweets. They should label these "sponsored topics" as such.