ReadWriteWeb {link no longer active} reports:
What are you doing? No what are you doing Apple, Skype, Flip, StubHub and Box.net. These popular companies just couldn’t resist paying off Twitter users to put advertisements into their Twitter streams using the new pay-per-tweet service Magpie.
Each of these companies have more than one campaign running and these are all just from the last six hours! Magpie is spewing Tweets through peoples’ accounts all day long. All of the links are obscured by URL shortening service is.gd (hope they are getting a cut!) and the clicker ends up on the advertiser site. Clearly disclosure isn’t mandatory; but even if it was this is just creepy, is it not?
Author Marshall Kirkpatrick takes a deeper look at these tweets and shows how silly they look when dozens of Twitter accounts say the same exact thing every six hours or so.
There s bound to be some creative monetization of Twitter feeds, and Magpie is certainly within their rights to do so, but we can t help but wonder how slippery is this slope for consumers before they just turn it off.
If you re going to use Twitter to connect with your audience, do it with the spirit of fostering communication and discussion, not as an opportunity to serve text ads to them. It’s not worth it.
