Just when you thought you saw the last of the PayPerPost copycats (who reincarnated themselves into IZEA), it looks like another company wants to pay users to insert various ads within their Twitter stream.
(Be-A-Magpie) Advertisers create campaigns providing a message and some keywords. Matching twitterers are selected, costs are calculated based on # of followers and hotness of the topic. Ads will be blended into the message stream: 5 tweets, one ad, 5 tweets, one ad…
Ironically Be-A-Magpie seems to be following the initial footsetps of IZEA by not requiring users to provide disclosure or even warn twitter followers that the tweet is an ad (say for example by posting [SPONSORED] within the tweet).
Be-A-Magpie does however attach a #magpie hashtag, which should help distinguish those tweeting for pennies from people engaging in real conversations (or at least spam free ones).
The service is already drawing negative reviews over at TechCrunch as well as from Robert Scoble (via FriendFeed), although only time will tell whether or not Twitter will take action against the service.
Author: Darnell Clayton
Darnell Clayton is a geek who discovered blogging long before he heard of the word “blog” (he called them “web journals” then).
When he is not tweeting, friendfeeding, or blogging about space, he enjoys running, reading and describing himself in third person.
Hi Darnell,
I do hope Twitter will take action and put a stop to Magpie spam on Twitter. Anyone on Twitter has at some point dealt with new “followers” who turn out to be spammers, which tends to get the spammers blocked completely.
Twitter is a community. A people community, wherein we can build personal relationships with those we follow and who follow us. Twitter should never become a haven for spam, nor should Magpie be allowed on a site intended to bring people together.
I hope that the magpie spam is put to stop! Twitter is a community where people network. We BUILD our follow and take them very serious, or at least I do, and having a spammer out there ruining the community dampers the whole situation.
It MUST be put to bed!!
I’m definitely not a fan of Magpie, and think that the analogy to PayPerPost is rather appropriate. Rather than allowing conversation to continue as normal with advertising in the background as has become the norm in the blogging world, Magpie tries to sneak some of the advertising message into the conversation through a back door and forces the user to manually filter out ads (which will become next to impossible as Magpie switches over to a user selected disclaimer model) that they don’t want to see.
It’s spam and it has the potential to devalue Twitter as a conversational medium if we continue to let services like this into the stream, so we need to stand together as a Twitter community and dictate when and how we’re willing to be advertised to instead of passively sitting by and waiting to see what happens.
(For more of my anti-Magpie rant, see: http://thefutureofads.com/2008/11/03/magpie-tries-to-make-twitter-an-ad-network-fails/)