

MacHeist: Participating developers' perspectives - Hagelin
http://homepage.mac.com/simx/technonova/reports/from_the_mouths_of_developers.html

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novum
Last time Macheist ran a bundle sale, they had a special offer where, if you
allowed Macheist to tweet on your behalf, you'd get some additional free
software along with your purchase.

This, of course, resulted in a massive Macheist tweetfest in which my timeline
was saturated for hours by identical Macheist tweets. I was really put off by
it, and I'll say in no uncertain terms that their tweet advertising kept me
from purchasing the bundle myself. I even called them out on it via twitter.

While their tweet ads are an ingenious (if annoying) marketing tool, and we're
probably still in the early days of Twitter ads, I sure hope they don't get
out of control.

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mustpax
The new retweet API should take care of this problem. My understanding is that
it will collapse all retweets of a message into a single message. So, if you
are following the original person who was retweeted, you won't see the retweet
at all. Otherwise the original tweet is going to be added to your timeline
once.

~~~
novum
They weren't retweets, though each tweet was the same. Macheist was using
OAuth to actually post a tweet on your behalf.

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adamhowell
I've been wondering lately, based on the success of MacHeist, if anything
similar could be started for web apps.

Obviously, recurring monthly payments is the hurdle you have to get over.
Asking for developers to work in some way to provide upfront discounts to a
large set of new users would be difficult, to say the least.

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dangrover
I've worked with MacHeist on a few of their promotions, with two of my
products, and it's been a positive experience.

