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Gee didn’t I already go over this?

by Steven Hodson on November 24, 2008 · Comments

Twitter MagpieSo guess what the hot topic today in social media was folks?

Yup that new evil invading Twitter called Magpie which allows you to use a 3rd party service to monetize your Twitter stream of consciousness. All the heavy weights are weighing in with their opinion about the service. You know the folks like Arrington, Valleywag, Jeremiah and one of my favourite bloggers David Risley. The interesting thing is that they are all pretty well in agreement - the idea sucks monkey balls (my words not their’s).

The fun thing here is though, that this is nothing new to me in the least. In fact I wrote about how bad this idea sucked in a post at The Inquisitr back at the beginning of the month. My opinion in the meantime hasn’t changed one iota and as I said in that post

In all seriousness though I personally think this idea stinks for a couple of reasons. The first is that while we might try to monetize things like blogs and RSS feed I don’t necessarily agree that things like Twitter streams; or any microblogging nonsense, needs to be monetized. Hell IRC has been running since we could let two computers communicate and no-one ever thought to try and make money from it. Newsgroups have been around since before the Internet and no-one thought that they needed to monetize their daily conversations. That is because Twitter is even much more of a partyline type of communication than things like blogs. Twitter isn’t a matter of producing content - it is talking with friends.

Monetizing your Twitter stream for self gain is - to me - akin to trying to sell off your sister on the street corner for a few bucks to stuff in your back pocket.

So while I am happy to see the general consensus about Magpie is the same I wonder what took the rest of you guys so long to figure this out. Maybe it was being tied up with all those conferences you have to go to eh.

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Tagged as: Magpie, RSS, social network, Twitter

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  • I'm going to trump you date-wise. Back on November, 7, 2007, I said that this was a good idea. Of course, I said it was a good idea for Twitter itself, not for individuals using Twitter:

    "Obviously you can't include an advertisement on every tweet, but is there another solution that would allow Twitter to make money while not alienating its audience? The best possibility that I can think of so far is for Twitter to send one advertisement for every 100 tweets that you send, and to target that advertisement based upon the text in those 100 tweets."

    The idea isn't unique to me - see what Jason Calacanis has written - and it makes sense for Twitter the company. People would be understanding if Twitter were using advertweets to support its service. People wouldn't be as understanding if I were using advertweets to support my trivia habit.

    P.S. I apologize to you, Shey, Duncan, and everyone else for not writing this comment in Canadian. :)
  • actually if you check the date of the post on Inquisitr I wrote the post November 1st :) as for not writing your comment in Canuck I'll let you go just this once :)
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