Too beautiful to last – this is how we could characterize Twitter’s ad free platform. The sad news is that it’s not Twitter destroying the dream – other companies come to invade a space where so many people used to communicate undisturbed about all that’s new and fun under the sun.

If ads would come from Twitter I could understand. Actually, I believe that every Twitter user would understand and tolerate the obvious: Twitter offers a great service, but are they making money with it? The answer is no: no to the making money, and no to the intent of inserting ads on Twitter.com.

If Twitter doesn’t insert ads it must be for a reason, or for a thousand reasons – but finding out why is not the purpose of this article. I leave the debate to others, more experienced at dissecting the financial implications of launching a service without a business model.

The discussion today will focus on Magpie. Aside the “long-tailed black-and-white crow that utters a raucous chattering call” meaning of the word, Princeton gives another definition: “an obnoxious and foolish and loquacious talker.” This is what Magpie wants you to become, and they are not even subtle in their mission.

With an “in your face” approach to business, Magpie chatters loudly: “be a magpie! Convert your tweets into bling-bling.” At this point I think Magpie deserves more to be called “Maggot” and I could name a million reasons why this is a more appropriate name.

be-a-magpie logo

“Make money with Twitter” type of services was to be expected, and they’ll multiply like rabbits as Twitter will continue to gain momentum. As hard as I try thought and searched, I couldn’t find anything worse or scarier than Magpie. Any committed Twitter user will see my point by just looking at the Magpie site, but for the others who might consider using Magpie to “monetize” their Twitter accounts, here’s what they should consider.

It took a long time for the community to accept paid blogging like Sponsored Reviews and PayPerPost. Even now “make money blogging” is not totally accepted by the community and the debate goes on. Selling ad space on a personal blog is a matter of personal choice – and because the blog is a private asset whatever you get paid to do with it is in the end of little importance. If they don’t like it the visitors would eventually stop visiting the blog in case.

But “monetizing” an account that is part of a public network where every action might impact the community, well, that’s a different story. “Making money with Twitter” is not an issue opened to abuse.

Twitter users like Twitter for these very reasons: it’s an ad free platform, it makes a great tool to communicate real-time news and real-time life streaming, and it makes a great social network – adding value to dialogue between people with similar interests, and so on. Any deviations from these reasons would eventually generate an aggressive reaction from the users.

Magpie’s business model is not viable on Twitter – it looks too much like spam, actually it is spam. Magpie twitts take away from the authenticity of the message, they “invade” the Twitter boxes of the “followers” with unsolicited messages.

If email spam had a definition (unsolicited bulk email messages), the definition for Twitter spam is not that much different. Many marketers try to sell their products by posting on Twitter, many giant corporations already have a Twitter presence, but instead of ads, these chose to actually communicate with their followers. Dialogue is the best form of advertising I guess. The Web is already saturated by ads of Magpie type – this is not adding value to the Twitter network, it’s bashing it. Twitter is about conversation, not about noise, soapboxing crap and spamming the network with random junk. Twitter is just not the place for such marketing campaigns, and I can only hope that none of my clients would ever consider it, for I will terminate the contract with that client on the spot. I will not have my name associated with any type of spam.

I found the best description of why Magpie is a bad idea on Sociosophy. And the same site does a great job at explaining who would use this service:

  • Someone who doesn’t understand Twitter at all
  • Someone who doesn’t understand Social Media at all
  • Someone who has no problem using their friends for revenue
  • Someone who doesn’t mind watching their Twitter follower count drop like Brits during the Black Plague

I cannot go on writing about this service – I am already annoyed and I don’t want to say things I would later regret. But I will use the ending found at Sociosophy, it summarizes perfectly my feelings:

Congratulations to the creators of this and other services like this… Turn your creativity into something that harnesses Web 2.0 and the Social Realm positively instead of filling it with this Web 1.0 mentality and muck.


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