Twitter Tuesday - clarifications on the advertising ban, plus some cool new apps

Twitter Tuesday - clarifications on the advertising ban, plus some cool new apps

Filed under: Features, Social Software, Microblogging

Back again with another Twitter Tuesday, and in this edition, I'm following up on some news I reported a couple of weeks ago about Twitter's crackdown on ad networks leading up to the launch of its own Promoted Tweets advertising system. I told you that third-party advertising in people's Twitter streams was banned altogether, but I also wrote that every third-party ad networked claimed this wouldn't affect their business. How can that be?

Well, I got a great email from one of those ad networks, Magpie, that explains why they're not too worried. There's been an ongoing discussion about ads on the Twitter developer mailing list on Google Groups, and Twitter reps have weighed in there to clarify the new ad policies in a way that seems to help services like Magpie.

It's still true that third-party services can't automatically inject ads into a Twitter stream, but users can still tweet ads of their own accord and get paid for it. As long as the user controls the content of the ad -- instead of having an app use the API to inject pre-written text -- everything is still kosher. That's because even though Twitter doesn't like the competition for Promoted Tweets, it would be bad for business to make rules on what users can and can't post. Controlling the API, of course, is a little different.

This does still knock out some of the more aggressive advertising services, forcing them to switch to a user-driven model. On the whole, I think that's a good thing, as it means less boilerplate advertising spam for everyone.

In Twitter apps news, we've got Twimbow, which is a web-based Twitter client that looks quite a lot like Tweetdeck (and has similar features). Unlike Tweetdeck, though, Twimbow lets you color-code your Twitter stream. You can assign colors to users or groups in the app, and then sort them by color later for easier organization. It's a visually appealing Twitter client, to be sure, and the choice of the web as a platform means you can take it anywhere and avoid dealing with Adobe Air and its baggage. Twimbow is well worth a look if your Twitter stream is just too disorganized to keep track of. It was just featured on Mashable, but it's still in pre-alpha right now -- so you may be waiting a while for an invite.

If you can't get enough Twitter, how about setting it as your OS X screensaver? Tweetica lets you do just that, displaying a screensaver based on hashtags you specify. It's not the most efficient way to read Twitter, but I can imagine it would be fun to put up on a large screen in a social-media savvy office. Thanks for the tip, Andreas!

Here's a disturbing first: the first state execution to be announced over Twitter. Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff tweeted his decision to approve the death of convicted murderer Ronnie Lee Gardner. Gardner was executed by firing squad, an outdated method that very few states still allow, which makes it even more interesting to see the state's AG using such a trendy method of communication for the announcement. What do you think, guys? Is it appropriate for a public official to use Twitter to release this kind of information?


That's Twitter Tuesday for this week. Thanks for checking it out! We'll be back next week with more news as Twitter continues to implement new features -- those annotations you've been hearing about might be here soon! Also, your tips have been awesome, Download Squad readers, so keep sending me your favorite Twitter apps!

Twitter Tuesday - clarifications on the advertising ban, plus some cool new apps originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 22 Jun 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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