Twitter vs. Magpie: Wait aren’t Magpie’s supposed to be one of the most annoying birds?

Image via Wikipedia

Colleen Coplick’s discussion Sunday about Twitter ad start up Magpie brought a lot to the surface, and from the tweet search on the topic I don’t think many folks are in favour of it.

Colleen plays Devil’s advocate contrasting Twitterfeed to Magpie:

I totally understand that point of view,  but I’m not sure how using magpie ads differ from using Twitterfeed to push my blog posts out to my followers. Why is that not considered spam but the magpie is? And would it be any different if Twitter themselves inserted ads into that same twitter stream?
Source: To Magpie or Not to Magpie, that is the Question.

I tried to explain in a 140 characters, but just couldn’t pull it off. So here it goes again, but with more room to write.

When I put something through Twitterfeed, and btw I pulled my link blog off it because people complained that it was too much, it’s me and my own content that is being published. People follow me, I gather, because they’d like to read what I have to say. I think because Twitter is closer, more personal, it would be link having an IM conversation with someone and having an ad come up, as you, every fourth message or so. It isn’t me talking, I can’t control it, it just comes. That would drive me batty.

I can’t imagine, or would want, my Twitter stream (which is pretty crowded as it is) clogged with ads too. And from looking at the ads that have been doled out thus far, wow they are pretty bad.

Consensus: Magpie, interesting idea, but destined to fail.

On Friday Colleen was talking about whether or not Twitter should even have a business model. Funny I was just thinking about this too. I’ve been thinking that really maybe Twitter has been built to be bought and probably by Google.

Twitter has become a core communications tool. Like email, like IM, like blogs, it almost seems like it should be free and free of ads.

Of course realistically we know that it can’t exist without cash flow, which lead me to wonder if Twitter would become like Gmail. Maybe off the right side there would be contextual ads based on the content of your twitter stream (and man that could get trippy). Maybe an on-screen gap with an ad or something.

I figure that Twitter will have to be ad-supported and I think Twitter users really don’t want ads within their Twitter stream so I see ads on the site to be the best option.

So, will Google step up and scoop up Twitter now or wait for a bidding war with Microsoft?

Update: I decided to re-run the Magpie “how much will you earn” script against my Twitter ID and this is a screenshot of my “worth”:

When it launched I checked it was like $200CAD, based on this it’s about $6,825CAD! Since most people said that they’d unfollow you right away, would that be worth it? And how are they funding this? That’s a lot of coin to be tossing around, or say you’ll be tossing around.

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Tagged as: business models, Magpie, online advertising, twitter