
Twitter will start serving you promoted tweets from accounts you don’t follow - Bry789123
http://venturebeat.com/2011/09/08/promoted-tweets-dont-follow/
======
pilif
I hope that these promoted tweets don't cause background notifications on my
phone. The second my phone vibrates to tell me that I just received an ad, is
the second I stop using twitter.

Which is a shame as I really like twitter as a concept and, honestly, I think
I would pay for not having to deal with this advertising crap. Careful
selection of whom I follow really has made my twitter feed to be one of the
few ad-free places on the web where 80% of the content is interesting to me.

This is the highest rate in years (in the beginning, Usenet was better, but
that was more than a decade ago). Don't take this away from me.

~~~
jasonkester
You piqued my curiosity. Could you give an example of a Twitter message that
you consider valuable enough that you'd actually want your phone to vibrate so
you'd see it immediately?

I don't think I've ever seen a Twitter message that I considered worth the
time spent in reading it, so it always surprises me to hear about people who
find them useful.

------
cryptoz
This is how Digg fell apart. I'm surprised they don't seem to be learning from
others' mistakes. They must feel huge pressure to start pulling in profit, but
this is not the way to do it. Surely they should be searching for a way to use
their vast databases and trend knowledge to make money rather than just
exploiting user's attention.

~~~
oldstrangers
Ads were definitely not what killed digg. The biggest upset in balance was the
increasing appeal of Reddit, a bloated staff, and Digg 4.0's RSS importer for
submissions, which effectively made users pointless (aside from voting). Digg
probably was still going to die, but these things certainly sped it up.

~~~
cbs
No, it wasn't the ads. Digg aways had ads. The problem was that the community
felt more and more pushed out the door. And it wasn't just thet there was an
RSS importer, it was that digg was replaced a website built around a community
with a website that was _nothing but_ an RSS reader. There was an
understanding in the community that the new digg was going to be about
allowing content creators to advertize, not the previous submission/voting
system (which was already skewed to the userbase's tolerance limits).

In short it was not the advertising content alone, but that the advertising
content replacing real content in a drive to monetize. That is exactly the
kind of thing twitter is doing.

Here is an open letter from Ohanian to Rose where he blames the downfall of
digg on the VC meddling. <http://alexisohanian.com/an-open-letter-to-kevin-
rose>

------
Tichy
"we didn’t want to sacrifice user experience"

Bullshit. They are ads. At least be honest about it.

~~~
staunch
Past tense. They "didn't want to" but now they do because the magic business
model fairy never arrived.

------
wmf
Tweets are already ads; it seems like they could just charge social media
experts™ to send tweets rather than injecting stuff that people probably don't
want.

------
slouch
Twitter is cable tv for me. I get some national news, a lot of stuff I don't
like and a little that I do from about 100 sources. I don't think I'll mind
ads.

~~~
irons
I love twitter, but if that's all I was getting from it, I wouldn't use it if
they paid me. Why do you bother following sources who show you a lot of stuff
you don't like?

~~~
jshen
I don't know about the op, but I'm in a similar boat. Here's why I do it.

1) I don't know of any source that likes exactly the same things as I do.
Think venn diagrams.

2) It's very easy to skim over the things that aren't interesting. I usually
see tweets through flipboard and it's like a magazine. I scan for interesting
things, and skip most of it.

This is the only way I know how to get the variety I want. I've thought about
writing a statistical classifier to filter out a lot of it. I should get off
my ass and do that.

~~~
slouch
I agree.

------
zoowar
Break the ad chain, use <https://identi.ca>

------
mattdeboard
Well, I don't want to be one of the "Oh god this ruins everything I've ever
loved" people, aka the hyperbole crew, but ... seriously? I manicure my
twitter stream pretty closely. If they're raising the signal:noise ratio, I
hope they give me a way to ... I don't know, not see it somehow.

~~~
RexRollman
I'm surprised that they have never offered a paid, pro version of Twitter.
Even features as simple as no-ads and access to their complete timeline
history would be enough to entice some people.

~~~
spitfire
They can't do that. Then you'd have revenue to base valuations on.

Revenue is a big no-no in silicon valley, it punctures the reality distortion
bubble.

~~~
kristiandupont
You bring up an excellent point about the difference between bootstrapping and
being funded. When you are on your own, profits are good, period. But if you
have to show people numbers, small numbers are bad and it might be more
"strategic" of you to show them other numbers (like usercount) that are big
instead.

------
0x12
Twitter is more than ripe for disruption. One of these days someone will pull
a google on them. Between the super slow 'new and improved' interface to
sending you spam (the whole point was that you only got the tweets from those
you follow) and 'twitter is over capacity, please try again in a few moments'
(which is a permanent fixture these days) I can't wait for the next iteration
of this concept, as long as it is done by people that know how to really scale
a backend.

~~~
oldstrangers
Twitters downfall will come when people realize that the service their
offering isn't exclusive. It can be easily duplicated and improved. It seems
similar to SMS and e-mail. The concept is something that will last forever,
but eventually, someone is going to create an open standard that allows for
people to submit "tweets" (or whatever the equivalent will be) from anywhere
to anyone on any platform. Imagine a podcast style system. Get live updates on
any device, subscribe to users from iTunes/GMAIL/etc.

It'll happen, sooner or later. (Probably sooner now).

To explain my idea better, think of internet messaging systems. People use
AIM, ICQ, Pidgin, etc. You can communicate with users on other platforms using
different software. Right now twitter is both the back-end and the front-end.
Eventually, it'll just be the front end like GTalk or Pidgin.

~~~
corin_
And yet of the non-techy people I know, they all either use Skype or MSN (or,
game-playing friends, Steam Friends).

------
wccrawford
For a little while now, I've been wondering why nobody has created email-like
systems for social networks.

By email-like, I mean that it's decentralized... Everyone can run their own
server. No 1 company has complete control over it. (Except possibly the root
DNS servers.)

People can subscribe to content from others (like Twitter) and receive those
updates automatically.

I'm thinking that when you subscribe to someone, their server is notified that
you subscribed, and your server remembers it as well.

If the person unsubscribes, the other server is notified, etc etc.

When you post, your server tells every subscriber's server that you posted and
gives them the message. If the person has unsubscribed, but there was no
notification, an 'unsubscribe' response is returned, instead of accepting the
message.

As far as I've thought it through, this means nobody can send you spam unless
you are subscribed to them. No companies can monetize you, unless you use
their server instead of running your own. With a set of standardized
protocols, it should be possible to create twitter-like clients that hook to
any server running this...

It doesn't have to be limited to 140 characters. It can have all kinds of
extras, like media or hashtags built-in. Replies can be threaded, instead of
hoping the other person knows why you are replying.

There's some other things to think about, such as what happens when a server
is offline for a while. Does it poll everyone to try to catch up? Do servers
send messages in batches back and forth, instead of dealing with things on a
user-by-user basis? etc etc.

~~~
imaginator
buddycloud does this.

Distributed, like email. Federated like email. Realtime. Your "home" server
maintains an inbox of events since you were last connected.

And we are working to standardise the protocol
(<https://buddycloud.org/wiki/XMPP_XEP>).

Yesterday we released the first working server that implemented the entire
protocol: <http://buddycloud.com/cms/node/247> and we are now working to
finish the webclient which looks like:
[http://buddycloud.com/cms/content/buddycloud-screen-dump-
par...](http://buddycloud.com/cms/content/buddycloud-screen-dump-part-2)

No 140char limit, no promoted tweets, no API agreement BS.

~~~
wccrawford
I'm glad to see this is being worked on. God-speed to you.

------
mtogo
Twitter was my RSS for a very long time. If they start injecting ads as
content now, i think I'll close my account since it is no longer serving it's
purpose. A bit of a shame really, i liked my spam-free Twitter.

------
cbs
Its sad they have to do this to monetize. But they wanted to build a
centralized platform, not a distributed service.

A single point of congestion on the Internet so that they could retain their
control, and now they're paying for it. They could have just been a federation
provider, and one of many equal-level service providers. It would have scaled
much, much, much better while offloading costs onto others.

Oh well. Thats where we are on the Internet today. Its all about the control a
signal, centralized, web-centric offering gives rather than the service it
provides to the users.

------
jasonkolb
Quite a slippery slope they've embarked on here. It'll be way too tempting to
turn up the ad frequency now if the quarter's numbers don't look good. Not a
good move.

------
espeed
So Google cuts them off and Twitter resorts to this? If Twitter is trying to
keep people from flocking to Google+, this is not the way.

~~~
protomyth
I thought Twitter cut Google off? Well, all the people with non-European names
/ pseudonyms will have to stay with Twitter.

------
clyfe
I'd like to start a twitter client that "curates content" based on ML and NLP.
"Curating of content" is on twitters "OK can do" list as far as I know. What
do you guys think about that?

"curates content" = skip the noise, more bacon.

older thread here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2971204>

------
shoham
Before everyone starts hyperventilating, they aren't going to send you emails
of promoted tweets from accounts you don't follow. This sounds like Reddit's
promoted links -- hopefully, like Reddit, they'll open it up to more users and
it won't be a repeat of what happened with Digg.

------
goombastic
As long as the ads are formatted differently or labeled, I am fine with it. I
am easily distracted. I don't spend too much time reading tweets and I
wouldn't want a tweet suddenly making me think about context when I don't want
it to.

------
swah
I really don't like keeping up with Twitter "stream". Just today I was
picturing how much better it would be for me to consume the information if the
folks I follow just discussed on some Google Group.

~~~
Tichy
How many people do you follow? I am pretty sure a Google Forum would not work
for me...

~~~
swah
256 now. I don't know how if that is a lot or a few.

But why wouldn't it work? Scanning your google groups topics shouldn't not
take longer than scanning the list of tweets...

------
benbscholz
What stops third party apps from filtering these tweets?

~~~
tlack
I guess that hints at why they've gotten so much tighter on indie client
developers.

------
Hisoka
Great move. It's time to grow up, ignore the people who complain (let them
move on, they won't click on ads anyway), and make some profit.

~~~
mattdeboard
Growing up == throwing your userbase in the shitter? In case you were in a
coma a year ago:
[http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...](http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=digg+implosion#sclient=psy&hl=en&source=hp&q=digg+v4+implosion&pbx=1&oq=digg+v4+implosion&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=9374l9951l0l10015l3l3l0l0l0l1l196l384l0.2l2l0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.&fp=e7169cfc39072be&biw=1591&bih=792)

Shoving your monetization attempts in the user's face by interrupting the
stream of information they expect from you is like shoving a dogshit-filled
paper towel in someone's nose right before they take a bite of cake.

~~~
armandososa
Twitter needs to make money or it will just go away.

How is showing sponsored tweets the same as "throwing your userbase in the
shitter"? Your sense of entitlement is as disgusting as your scatological
language.

Don't like it? vote with your feet.

~~~
orblivion
I know what you mean by sense of entitlement, that sort of thing annoys me
too. But in this case I don't think the person was displaying a sense of
entitlement. Just opining that people will, in fact, vote with their feet, and
that it's going to hurt Twitter a lot.

~~~
dmix
> Just opining that people will, in fact, vote with their feet, and that it's
> going to hurt Twitter a lot.

Well, if the people are going to do this when Twitter finally figures out a
monetization strategy, then Twitter won't be in business for very long and
people will be forced to find an alternative either way.

It's a bit silly to expect them to continue living off of hundreds of millions
of VC money to preserve an ad-free user experience.

