Q. What will users see?
A. You will start to see Tweets promoted by our partner advertisers called out at the top of some Twitter.com search results pages. We strongly believe that Promoted Tweets should be useful to you. We’ll attempt to measure whether the Tweets resonate with users and stop showing Promoted Tweets that don’t resonate. Promoted Tweets will be clearly labeled as “promoted” when an advertiser is paying, but in every other respect they will first exist as regular Tweets and will be organically sent to the timelines of those who follow a brand. Promoted Tweets will also retain all the functionality of a regular Tweet including replying, Retweeting, and favoriting. Only one Promoted Tweet will be displayed on the search results page.
Will "Promoted Tweets" be as useful to us as other forms of relevancy-based online advertising? After all, an algorithm's idea of "relevant" differs vastly from what I actually consider relevant.
And, I was talking this morning to @chrissmari -- http://twitter.com/chrissmari -- about Google's ads. While I never click on the ads served up at google.com, she said she occasionally clicks on one of the "relevant" ads served up in Gmail, because they're so often hilariously irrelevant. I'm the same way.
But, at the end of the day, even if Twitter achieves relevancy, which is extremely doubtful, I predict that the overwhelming majority of users will be 1) eager to seem progressive and say "maybe it won't be that bad" and then, finally, 2) powerfully annoyed by this development once it lands in their streams.
I could be wrong. I hope I'm wrong.
So, assuming I'm right (which, if you know me, you know I love to do)...
Two potential responses from javascript ninjas who don't want to choke on "relevant" ads in their Twitter streams:
Passive = Script for removing Twitter ads from our streams
Aggressive = Script for automagically reporting Promoted Tweets as spam
