The end of twitter’s innocence

Twitter has been a huge success. In 2009, anyway. 2008 wasn’t nearly as good, and I predicted several times over (not necessarily on my own blog, mind) that 2010 will be the year twitter goes into decline. The proliferation of spam, useless hashtags for competitions promoting websites, and a top-tier userlist that reads like a celebrity gossip mag will ruin the service. The core fanbase are either leaving or making their accounts private to avoid getting more spam. People are less interested in getting followers, and in turn following others, as they are in building a small, manageable core group of friends they can interact with.

All of this happened before with myspace and bebo. People got sick of the constant spam and lack of updates from the server-sides, so when facebook showed up they flocked to it, locking down their accounts to have only their friends look at their photos and interact with them. Someone will figure out the tech needed to fix the problems twitter has and make a better service. No doubt it already exists, it just needs someone to market it with a cool, mono-syllabic name and cute logo. Once this happens everyone will flock to it, just as Twitter figures out how to monetise. Thus leaving that service in debt from investors and a bunch of people in charge who didn’t want to sell up in order to naively start their own business revolution.

Everyone knows how to make money on twitter, except twitter itself. Ads in the twitter stream. Sure, premium accounts are fine, but most people won’t bother with that (in the same way most flickr users use the free account rather then premium). Ads work well. Using tweetie on the Mac as an example, it places a nice ad in the stream to pay for the software, unless you actually buy the premium version which just removes the ads. But twitter has had some strange aversion to it, thus bringing up a community that’s not used to them. So when they introduce a policy of ads every 500 tweets (or whatever system they use) it’ll confuse and scare the community.

Today I came across one of the worst things I’ve seen on twitter. Worse then the follower-count whores or “social media gurus”. Ads. Except these ads aren’t run by Twitter… or even Google. This is in-stream advertising where you sign up with your account and become a publisher, much like putting adsense ads on your site or blog. Then advertisers can come along and buy “slots” in which to insert an ad into your stream. Some people have less then 200 followers on this service, and assuming at least 100 followers in everyones account is spam, that’s a low catchment rate. However, people like Kim Kardashian & TechCrunch, who have thousands of followers are on the list of people pushing ads through the service. Some users, however, set up their accounts to push ads in order to generate revenue for charity. Which makes the celebs and businesses that are listed on the site a bit depraved for using a system that actively encourages charitable donations.

There’s nothing wrong with the system itself, but the idea that some tosser on twitter can make money from their account by spamming me doesn’t sit well. Anyone who does it (and granted, no one on my list has done so) is likely to find themselves on the short end of my “unfollow” button. The system also provides google-style analytics to see what you’re earning and how you’re doing. But this is where it’s likely to confuse users. People have been confusing a follower count for community. There’s a difference in having an engaged, happy and interested group of friends on twitter versus a bunch of people who couldn’t care less about your tweets, and in all likelyhood ignore your tweets. And you can be damn sure if you use this ads service you’ll be part of the latter grouping.

If you want to check the system out yourself just pop over to ad.ly. If I’m following you & you use it – god help you!