Recently, I signed up with a company called Sponsored Tweets.  It’s a pretty simple system really.  You sign up and set the price you’d like to get paid per tweeted ad.  On the other side, Sponsored Tweets has a whole group of advertisers looking to have you tweet an advertisement for them.  If they think your price fits your twitter account’s reach and influence, then they contact you.  At this point, you agree on a price, and you send out a tweet advertising their product.  Very simple, and an affective way for companies to harness the power of Twitter.

I’ve mentioned this product to a few people, and their initial reaction is generally bordering on disgust.  When I ask what caused their face to turn sour, they almost always describe some sort of assumed purity in their Twitter feed.  This, as a developer, has a tendency to irk me in several ways.  After taking a few nerd breaths, I recompose myself and ask one simple question:

“How much are you paying to use Twitter?”

This is the exact same question I pose to folks who complain about design and policy changes on Facebook.  Or those who are still pouting about the inclusion of Buzz in Google’s *ahem* free e-mail service, GMail.  I am continually perplexed by the vast amount of entitlement assumed by the citizens of the internet. The last I checked, no one forced you to sign up for these services.  Nor did anyone ask you to disregard the respective services’ legal terms.

My other point of contention is the assumption that some phantom benefactor is paying for these services’ operational fees.  Server space, employee wages and legal fees are not paid with pictures of your dog, Snookie, or your tweet regarding a hot new bar in town.  They are, however, paid by allowing advertisers to target their ads in a very direct manner.

So, as a developer, I have no issue what so ever with seeing ads in my twitter feed, nor tweeting the occasional ad.  Do I want to see an ad every other tweet, not really. But if while Twitter takes its time figuring out how to monetize their system, far be it from me to not make a little extra cash while I tweet.

With all that being said, I’m interested in what you have to say.  So please,  developers and non-developers alike, chime in with your thoughts on the topics discussed above.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 26th, 2010 at 10:25 pm and is filed under Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.