Twitter Update

Earlier this week I wrote about Twitter and whether it would become too much for a lot of people in the near future.

While scanning my google reader today I came across this FastCompany, The Week that Twitter Tipped, talking about how there has been a huge boom in the notoriety of Twitter in recent months and especially this current week.

The one thing in the article I really found interesting was one company's attempt to create an ad format that will allow Twitterers to put advertising in their tweets

Web advertising company Adjix has announced that it's creating a new ad format that will allow individual Twitter users to embed ads in their tweets and monetize their popularity on the service.

Overall, it seems like advertising through these social networks has not been hugely beneficial for most companies or the network itself. Things such as display ads on Facebook have not been announced to pull huge numbers or huge revenues, and MySpace does well in terms of ad revenue but the effectiveness of it has never blown anyones socks off.

The real question is, will advertising in people's messages end up hurting Twitter in the long run? Twitter obviously needs some revenue because as the article points out they have had $55 million in venture capital invested and don't have much revenue to speak of. But at what cost? Will tweets with advertising included end up angering a large portion of the users and therefore pushing them to a newer and greater Twitter clone that has just risen?

I personally think that companies will get more value from using Twitter like they would a Facebook application, give the consumers something to do with it. In the article it mentioned Skittles and what they are doing with Twitter, but instead of them paying someone to include a skittles logo in their tweet, create a Twitter feed that allows people to "Tell us what your doing as you eat your skittles" or something along those lines. I'm sure consumers will get a kick out of some of the crazy shenanigans going on as people taste the rainbow.