I thought that they'd pretty much announced that they were doing it? Effectively placing adverts in the timeline.
But this is about Twitter the platform rather than Twitter the organisation isn't it? It's closer to formalising the sort of promo the MacHeist guys do where you get extra stuff for tweeting about them.
I must admit I like the idea as a business. It's limitation is that the more successful it is, the more frequent it's messages, the more spam like it becomes, the more people will hate it and the less successful it will become...
i encountered this sort of "pay with a tweet" (pwat?) via a macheist promo you're mentioning and i had exactly the same reaction as actually paying cash, except that it was more difficult because it was a sort of half-hearted, monetarily encouraged plug for something i wasn't internally raving about. At the point i actually did it, i felt like i had sold out.
Which is to say that pwat could be totally effective in being a payment mechanism, but only if the stakes of the pwat's message are high enough to equate to a non-trivial reblogging of a url.
You can pay with a tweet - but are the tweets that are used as currency are going to be seen as genuine?
If enthusiasm isn't authentic .. who's going to take notice?
If the generated buzz isn't actually generating interest organically, then this scheme is just about link building .. which is equivalent to spamming imo.
What's inauthentic about paying for a product with social karma? It's not like this system is duping people into tweeting out ads. Everyone on Twitter knows what it means to tweet, and they will understand that paying with a tweet means that it goes on their feed, and that their followers will therefore have a {positive/negative/neutral} reaction to it.
And, even if some rooks do not have that understanding, it will not ruin things for those of us that do, because we will unfollow them.
This reminds me of an article I read in Wired back in the 1998 timeframe about two diamond dealers from Montreal getting caught up in the California dot com hoopla. I don't remember the specifics of the article but what I do remember is the dealers' assessment of "The Web" only being really being useful as a direct marketing tool.
As opposed to spam or other Twitter ad-networks where you need thousands of followers before you can earn a dollar, this creates a win-win situation for both the payer and the payee. Instead of hoping that people who downloaded your free product will recommend it to others, you can now rely on it.
However, you tweet before you have seen the product. Thus you might be recommending crap to your followers that you would rather warn them about.
Not every, just most. The time I saw this used, I was quite interested to learn of the concept (as an entrepreneur admiring the idea) and find out about the band being promoted.
I've seen it once, which is a lot less than I've seen people checking in with Foursquare stuff which is excruciatingly boring.
Just like we all have something like a fake/spam email address (that we give out to the sites we don't care about) -- we'll end up with fake twitter accounts.
Also - can't we just filter this out from a client?
Tweeting before you have seen/heard the product is an issue, but you can at least customise the message when you "pay" - e.g., "About to check out the new Band X download. See what you think: http..."
Stumbled across Pay With A Tweet in the wild a couple of weeks ago and thought it was quite novel. That said, I didn't know that it let you customise the message and didn't really know the band I was checking out, so I didn't make use of it.
It's on par with the services where people charge you for them to Tweet about something and they don't seem to to have been received to badly. Just another form of advertising I guess.
I have a separate account for that stuff - JonIsAWhore I believe it's called (it's been a while since I used it).
I don't mind these things. If I have friends who abuse them I unfollow them or hide their updates.
The only thing I'd like is to know that I can get the product / service the old fashioned way if I want by paying cash, and keeping my soul clean if that's what I choose to do.
I don't know. People will be tempted to get whatever free shit they can through such a service, but I think that urge will be attenuated by their desire to not piss off their followers.
I could see myself using this to purchase things that I think my followers would like, or at least not hate.
Plus I've seen plenty of things like this on Twitter already: "RT this to be entered to win!". It doesn't anger me when I see those things from the cool people I follow.
At first it did seem like spamming, but I am at peace with it now. It is analogous to the FB Like button. You should only tweet out stuff that you like, and want to share and download.
The key is to give a sample of the product (in our case song clip) before broadcasting to your social network. I think we could even allow full song stream, and still see similar download/tweet numbers.
In a world where musicians don't get real currency, they are asking for your social currency.
Despite my misgivings, I do think it's interesting how Twitter's evolving as an interpersonal protocol .. with natural language and semantic hacks expanding the scope of each 160 character blob.
About the spamming bit:
It is a genuine recommendation. You are directly recommending that product. It is not like a product where you have to recommend some other product that you don't care about or don't even care to use.
Every tweet is to be judge by a case by case basis.
