Death of Twitter?

Tuesday, 13 April 2010

I know I've been writing about technology a lot lately, and if that's not your interest I apologize. I promise a nice, in-depth update on some real-world stuff soon.

Twitter, who has long decried in-stream advertising as a bad business model, recently announced their upcoming revenue-generating business model. And that business model is in-stream advertising. They're starting today by inserting "Promoted Tweets" into search results and slowly may begin integrating these Promoted Tweets into users' streams. So, if they go full force with this plan, that means that your Twitter stream will consist not only of tweets written by people you choose to follow, but may also include a tweet from Starbucks about a coffee giveaway. Even if you don't follow Starbucks.

I'm not against advertising on the Internet. Really, I'm not. I understand that businesses need a revenue model to stay in operation. They have the choice to display ads, and I have the choice of whether or not to use their service. Sometimes I do choose to use their services (Google, YouTube) and sometimes the ads are intrusive or annoying enough that I don't (Mashable, MSNBC). To explain why I'm really disappointed in Twitter's revenue model here, I think I should explain how I use Twitter.

Every Twitter user interacts with the Twitter service in their own unique way. January, for example, mainly reads her Twitter stream on her iPhone at fixed intervals. When she has some downtime, she will open up Tweetie on her iPhone and read everything since the last time she checked. My interaction with Twitter is a bit more continuous. I use the Tweetie application on my Mac in tandem with the Growl notification system. Growl is a sort of system-wide notification system that programs can use to trigger popup notices when certain events happen. In the case of Tweetie, any time somebody I'm following says something, I get a little popup notification on my screen with their image, name, and what they said.

growl

I know that, for most people, getting constant popups like that would be a huge distraction. I've been a big instant message user for a long time, and as such I've gotten used to popup notifications from people I choose to receive them from. I've gotten to the point where I can take a glance and the picture of who sent a message and make a quick assessment of whether I need to read it. Generally it's something I want to read, but if I'm particularly busy I can make a mental note of who was tryign to get my attention and move on. The problem with inserting Promoted Tweets into users' Twitter streams is that, once this goes live, people who use Twitter similarly to the way I do will all of a sudden be subject to these popup ads directly on their desktop, without having opted to recieve them.

The popup messages I'm currently getting from my Twitter stream are fine because I have specifically said, "I want to get updates from this user." Now that Twitter will be pushing Promoted Tweets to all users, I no longer have the ability to choose what content I want to see and I have no way to ignore them.

If this sytem goes into effect, I really don't know if I'll continue using Twitter or not. It's not an emotional, kneejerk reaction. I don't really think, as the subject of this post might suggest, that this will be the "death of Twitter." It's just the fact that the distraction this change introduces, given the way I'm currently using Twitter, will outweight the utility. Maybe I'll adapt and use Twitter less, maybe Twitter will agree to only push one or two of these sposored tweets per day -- time will tell. I just wanted to go into a little detail as to why this proposed ad system really neuters the utility of Twitter for someone who uses Twitter the way I do.

What do you think? Would this change be as big a distraction to you as to me, or will you just ignore them the way we've gotten use to ignoring banner ads?


Tags: daily  technology 

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