Dan Florio takes the moral high ground and explains why he removed himself from the controversial Twitter third party commercial service called Magpie.
I just deleted my Magpie account - with only one ad served. My reasoning is twofold: first, It was bothersome to me that I was apprehensive about seeing an ad placed in my name that my followers wouldn't appreciate. Secondly, and the main reason I quit, is that Twitter doesn't yet make money off of the people who use it. Sooner or later they will and hopefully their business model will include a way for the users to get a percentage. If not then I'll sign up for a service like Magpie.
Magpie is a Twitter ad service that Twitter users can sign up for. Magpie will insert ads into the Twitter stream on your behalf at a rate the user can determine. The default rate is one ad per 5 twits. The user makes money depending on the number of followers they have and the keywords used.
When I signed up it estimated that I would make just a little over 100 pounds a month which I think translates into something like 5 billion US dollars. :-)
I'm wondering what people think of this service. Obviously no one is saying, "Cool, more ads. I can't wait." I've read another post about it and people in the comments seem pretty bent on hating it. I personally don't see what the big frakking deal is. If everyone I follow signed up for it then I'd see about one ad every five minutes. I can deal with that.
Here is a link to my poll about what people think of Magpie:
http://polygeek.com/1429_flex_going-to-the-dark-side-with-magpie
I'm interested in seeing how this pans out in the long run. Something like this could be squashed pretty quick if Twitter clients added a feature to simply block out any tweet with #magpie in it. Even better, just add an input field so that each user can type in terms that they want the client to ignore. That way as new services come out the users could just update their blocked words and problem solved. Plus it would come in handy if you really hate the show Heroes, or something like, you could enter that word and any tweets with heroes in it would be skipped.
According to ReadWriteWeb about 56% of Twitterers use the browser. I'll bet that number goes down quick as twitter spam becomes more of an issue, assuming Twitter clients can help block it. There's also Twalala.com to help those stuck on the browser develop a #magpie "mute" button.
Dan Florio - aka polyGeek - is a freelance Actionscript Flex/Flash/AIR developer living in Crestline, California with his wife Jill. His Flash and Flex shareware apps can be found at polyGeek.com
