Twitter unveils Promoted Tweets

Twitter’s founder Biz Stone used his blog to announce news of the site’s new ‘promoted tweets’ integrated advertising service. Biz wrote: ‘We hope you'll share in our enthusiasm as today we unveil a simple service we're calling Promoted Tweets.’ So is this good news or bad news, or perhaps one disguised as the other?

Advertising messages will now feature among regular tweets, although their exact format is yet to be determined. In the ‘first phase’ of rollout, they’ll appear at the top of the list of search results. However, the service could develop further as there’s no saying yet what further ‘phases’ could bring. Biz Stone is apparently proud to have so far refused to allow traditional forms of advertising on his site and to have held out for a more original model, unveiled yesterday.

If you think about it though, Biz’s blog post is asking us to be pleased that pure, unbridled advertising messages that are easy to spot and identify have been rejected in favour of targeted advertising (using Twittter user data) that’s integrated into the site’s content, and which users could mix up with regular tweets.

In any case, I’m sure Facebook’s creators will be watching all of this very carefully.

Sponsored status anyone?

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