Tomorrow is d-day for Twitter as it will begin to introduce ads in an effort to turn Tweeters into dollars and cents. As I understand it, Tweeter will soon find ads at the top of the search list based upon keywords that have been used. So a search for Starbucks might yield Tweets from Starbucks advertising $0.50 off a Grande Latte or whatever. The next step is apparently to insert advertiser Tweets into your Twitter feed.
Step 1 is OK with me – I have never searched for anything on Twitter, so no ads for me. Step 2 presents something that I am uninterested in - part of Twitters value to me is that I get to choose whose Tweets I read. If I see value, I follow. If I don’t get any value, I stop following. Easy. Pushing unwanted ads will seem intrusive and detract from my overall experience. It was a problem on Explorer, Firefox etc, but Ad blockers and Popup blockers do a great job minimizing the clutter. My hope would be that Tweetdeck et al are able to build filters to help manage the mess, assuming Tweetdeck remains a tool with Twitter at its heart (Please read Fred Wilson’s thoughts on Twitter. He is Principal at Union Square Ventures, one of Twitter’s lead investors.)
The challenge for Twitter will be presenting advertising in a relatively unintrusive manner. For example, a Tweet from someone that I follow which points me to a particular product might be of interest as these folks are trusted sources. I believe that most users will be tolerant as Twitter does have value. At the end of the day, it is in our interests to see the company prosper and grow.
That said, I do not think it would take much to encourage some people to go somewhere else. This Internet thing seems to be pretty adept at providing alternate solutions to things…
I am curious to see how Twitter is tomorrow.
