Twitter to auction off words

Twitter will start auctioning off keywords, gluing promoted tweets to the top of search results, but won't start pushing out advertising until the end of the year. The new service is called "Prompted Tweets" and allows a company to pay to have a specific tweet promoted to the top of search results, with a small note saying who …

[Robin]

In-tweet Ad-ing?

Surely if this 'succeeds', then the next logical step is inline advertising right in the middle of what people are blathering about? Thus reducing the number of characters they can 'use' to about 5.

"Hey I'm [FOR ALL YOUR PHARMACEUTICAL NEEDS GO TO spamfest.ng]" etc.

Can't wait to ignore that, too.

[TeeCee]

I'd like to buy:

"up", "arsehats", "the", "shut" and "fuck" please. I'll probably be needing a comma with that lot too*, is punctuation cheaper?

*Yeah I know, pearls before swine, but I can't bring myself to do without.

[Dale Richards]

Web 2.0

"Twitter will have to tread very carefully to avoid offending its fickle customers"

As with Facebook, MySpace and all the other Web 2.0 bollocks, the "customers" are the advertisers. The poor souls who use the services are the product that's being sold.

[rastansaga]

*cough* ad-block

Won't be long until ad-block type functionality in clients disposes of the annoyances

[heyrick]

There's a scary concept in there...

Judging how well an advert "resonates" by seeing how many times it is passed on. In other words, will anybody "retweet" the spam? OMG.

Still, the resonate/auto-pull ought to mean it'll be a slightly higher class of spam than numerous so called targetted adverts. No thank you, I don't want an ING loan and I don't need "enhancement surgery"..

[Version 1.0]

So they're still trying to get bought?

by Google? Oh dear - I'd rather hoped that they'd come up with a better idea than that one...