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No I don't want random stranger's deciding what ad's are in front of me Thank you! ;)
The parallels between early blogging and early twitter are incredible and I think a useful lens to use when looking at the issues twitter is facing. Early blogging looked like a monolithic "blogosphere" but that's not the reality of the situation, and the same goes for twitter. Also early blogging was much more personal and early attempts to monetize blogs received the ire of purist bloggers as it would ruin the integrity etc. etc. Anyway, I for one will keep my mind open and curious because I have no idea what's going to happen :-)
But you have no control over what Magpie uses your stream to advertise.
Don't approve of Company X's policies? Tough - once twittered, it's there forever - even if you were to delete it from your stream. Summize proved that.
Twitter is going to monetize. Look at their current job listings. You will see the one that is specifically designed to implement (at long last) their monetization plan.
The problem is that Magpie depends upon you having an audience to advertise to. I, the audience, refuse to participate.
It would not - in the long run - prove to be a viable strategy for retaining your conversational partners.
This will go the way of the dinosaurs as quickly as pay-per-tweet went.
I already created a tool, Last Tweets (http://lastweet.appspot.com/), which can check your friends who might be using Magpie. Here is a screenshot ot it: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_CLdf4ORfzWk/SQ5UhgFGA...
However, it will only check first 100 friends and might take up to 10 mins to check (maybe more).
I think "blocking" is kind of overreacting since they are your friend (ain't they?).
I just wanted to ask one thing to all guys who dont support Magpie, why do you support adsense then, or those 125x125 banners you have placed on this site??
and on the edge, magpie tweets occur so rarely, whats the harm then.. its just like the refular contextual advertising..
twitter is a microblogging platform and its supposed to be monetized... whats the harm in there???
Moreover, for those use Device Update to sms to their phone, what do they think? You pay money to receive sms but those are ads? They are not even agreed to receive.
I understand what they were trying to do and how they thought it made sense - but I think your article is dead on.
I follow nearly 3,800 users right now... and that's not even a large amount compared to people like @chrisbrogan, @scobleizer, @guykawasaki and the like.
Can you imagine if every one of those people used it? I'd stop using Twitter like it was poisonous and migrate completely over to one of the competitors.
The problem, as you so clearly pointed out, is that it's akin to having one of my friends suddenly stop every 5 sentences and blurt out "Magpie! Buy Bob's Bubble Bath!" and then go back to their conversation as if nothing had happened.
But worse yet, it's like being at a cocktail party where everyone around me was doing that. Maddening.
I do appreciate the positions - Magpie was searching for a way to monetize the Twitterstream. Everyone can use more money in this economy and the temptation to put 'just a couple of ads in their stream' is easy to see. But I've already unfollowed one friend who was "just testing it out to see whether to advise their clients to use it." My answer? Advise them not to.
And for anyone who doesn't see this as spam, perhaps not technically, but the functional result is the same...with spam I have to filter through and ignore/delete spam emails to get to the real emails. Magpie would have exactly the same effect -- all it does is slow me down and annoy me. Don't do it!
It LOOKS like contextual, but when someone talks about a lot of stuff, it's hard to shuffle through and see if it really is. But from what I could see, magpie fails at the context.
http://www.studionashvegas.com/2008/11/18/magpi...
I think the massive number of comments on my post are pretty indicative of the general dislike for Magpie. A twitterpal posted a positive blog review of magpie as she joined it, and few people commented positively.
I suspect that they will die rapidly as advertisers realize that using their service will simply create a negative impression of their product.
I understand the intent, but the implementation is incorrect for the medium.
It's too bad that they are luring people with promises of $$$ in bad economic times... because all they are doing is ruining those peoples' twitter experience for a few euros.
if magpie respects the privacy of users and doesn't engage to many people for their campaigns, i'm pretty confident they will manage to have success.
If Magpie had thought it through and actually properly analyzed both Twitter and its users, it would have realized that their CPM model is NOT the way forward for monetizing Twitter. As pretty much anyone against it has said, the reason Magpie does not work is because it's not conversational.
It's also forcing people who never signed up for the service to have the adverts in their Twitter stream. Where is the social aspect of that? Isn't it called social media for a reason?
Wouldn't it have been better to have the ads solely in the streams of those who signed up for it? Advertisers will still have an audience, and in fact, will have a more captive audience because they're placing their ads in a stream of someone already signed up.
What's worrying is that the CEO of Magpie has recently announced the #magpie disclaimer no longer needs to be used - an ad can go out as if it's a normal Tweet. This is not good news - it's false advertising and it's also potentially going to break the trust factor between follows and followers.
Interesting that the service is named after a bird that basically steals and scavenges - apt.