Twitter, now almost as ubiquitous a name as Google, is apparently coming into its own (for those who own a slice of the private company), and has struck open source deals that will allow for advertising messages to be imbedded within all of those tweets that so many people are (purportedly) subscribing to.
I'll admit that I did sign up to follow the tweets of a few of my pundit friends, and I'm only glad that I turned off the "alert via txt msg" button, otherwise I'd have to cancel my cell phone service entirely.
Of course I believe in the concept of leveraging social networks to promote consumer products. And of course, I'm influenced by what my friends are buying in the course of making my own purchase decisions. Well, sort of.
But now that Ad.fly and others are making it easy for my 'friends' to insert advertising messages within their tweets, do I really buy into it? Do I really want to be cluttered with messages, knowing that my 'friends' are exploiting ther friendship in order to make money from me? What does this say about the social contract, that we, as 'friends' have made with each other?
OK, I'm jealous; unlike Ashton K., or Larry K., I don't have 1 million+ "followers". I only have a few hundred or so. Most of them prefer to go to this blog, or one of the others that I've become famous for. How many of them are going to appreciate knowing that I'm getting paid to pitch my favorite toothpaste, or my favorite burger joint?
And what happens when the FTC decides to enforce their stupid new rules about blogger disclosures, and single me out for promoting a product on my tweets without including a disclaimer? I won't be happy. But its safe to bet that big time bloggers that have friends in Washington won't have to worry about this. Does Eliot Spitzer tweet?
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