As more and more marketers move into the Twittersphere it was inevitable that at some point the manipulation of Twitter users would start. It actual started to take root a little while go with people being able to add advertising messages in their Twitter stream. Two of the most well known versions of this are the service from Magpie and the other being Adjix which is hawked by Guy Kawasaki and uses in his tweets.

The idea behind Magpie is that you can let them insert an advertisement in your Twitter stream but limit it to a certain number of time the ads can be displayed. Starting yesterday with a heated – and totally misguided – post by Marshall Kirkpatrick on ReadWriteWeb the conversation about Magpie has once again re-ignited. Marshall’s argument against the service has; in posts by both Mark Hopkins and Allen Stern, been shown to be off base as it isn’t the major companies using the ad service but rather affiliates.

When it comes to Adjix on the other hand the method of advertising is a lot more behind the scenes as the company provides a URL shortening service that allows you to embed an advertisement

When people click on the Adjix link we run an optional text ad from the Adjix ad network at the top of the page. You’ll earn revenue from these ads provided that you were logged into your free Adjix Linker account when you created your short link.

Source: Adjix – What is Adjix

Of the two I would probably use the Magpie service because it at least is more above board than the Adjix service. Personally I find the idea of Adjix as being borderline reprehensible in that it is nothing short of trickery and a deception.

However both of these are still better in my opinion of something that is beginning to rear its ugly head within the Twittersphere and one of the more recent hot ways to use the service. If you use Twitter at all you will quite often see see tweets being repeated by other people. This is called retweeting and is proving to be a quite popular addition to Twitter.

The one problem with this is that in a hunt to find ways to give the service some measure of marketing ROI retweeting is being billed as the new authority ranking system. The idea being that the more often your tweets are re-broadcasted by other people the stronger your reputation becomes and the stronger the reputation the more authority you have.

While I have a fundamental problem with this concept I ran across a post by someone heavily involved in trying to create a valuation system within Twitter. In his post Dan Zarrella was announcing yet another service built around Twitter but in this case it was one that is targeting this retweeting concept on Twitter.

The site called ReTweet.net is intended in Dan’s words to

This version of the tool allows you to enter the URL of a page or blog post you’d like to have ReTweeted and receive suggestions of highly ReTweetable related words to add to your content and use when Tweeting said content.

In other words the world of SEO meets Twitter.

Not only does this service suggests words to use in your tweet about something it also says you should use those same words within your actual post. Once more we have tools being created that allow marketers to craft text in a fashion that manipulates human nature in order to increase authority through retweeting.

I put this service on the same level as Adjix as it serves not other purpose than to manipulate the system and the users of a service. Sorry but this isn’t a cool service but one that seeks to artificially inflate some person’s authority within the Twittersphere.

It was inevitable that something like this wouldn’t come along but that doesn’t mean that we should condone its usage.

[picture courtesy of Monkeywright]