Twitter seems to be testing the technology to add footnote ads to mobile phone messages sent from its site, according to Caroline McCarty of CNET. 

This is great news for all those who’ve been waiting to see how Twitter would manage to destroy it’s growing popularity in an attempt to actually make money.

The ads seen so far append up to 25 characters of unrequested, undesired text to the end of the 140 character user message.  Nothing identifies these as automatic, unwanted additions (not sent by the person who actually sent the message) except for the hardly helpful prefix "Tip:".  When you’re jamming on extra words nearly twenty per cent the size of the message, perhaps something more suitable like "WARNING: The person you signed up to our service to read did not write this.  We did.  Enjoy, and please start making us money you freeloading peons!"

"PS We apologise for any hilarious misunderstandings our revenue-generation test causes!"

Many in the tech community are resigned to this sort of advertising.  Some even welcome it, excited that Twitter might be able to turn a stupid little thing like devoted followers and popular support into something important, like cash. 

The problem is that Twitter is popular simply because it’s social networking stripped down to the bone – status messages and nothing else.  Status messages unburied by crap are its entire deal.  Start screwing around with the status messages, or burying them in crap, and you could easily break why people like you.

Co-founder of Twitter, Ev Williams, told the Guardian that an alternative to invading and modifying personal communications would be to set up corporate Twitter pages. This is a far preferable option – as people can block them the same way they’ve been forced to on MySpace, Facebook, Hi5, Bebo….

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Entry was posted on Tuesday, October 9th, 2007 at 10:16 am under Advertising, Cell phones.

Read more entries by Luke McKinney.
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