Twitter To Block Third-Party Paid Tweets 83
tekgoblin writes "Today Twitter announced on its blog an upcoming change to its Terms of Service. The change will not allow anyone to promote paid tweets through the Twitter API. Twitter had announced previously that it will be releasing a 'Promoted Tweets' platform for advertisers that will be non-intrusive and will always be relevant to the Twitter timeline. This action taken by Twitter could be a hard hit for small publishers that relied on the paid tweets that will be blocked shortly. Depending on how expensive the Twitter Promoted Tweets will be, this will show us whether or not Promoted Tweets will be good for the little guy."
Re:Small publishers (Score:3, Interesting)
Thanks to network effects, the bigger the player the more valuable the property(architecturally, making your own Twitter, with blackjack, and hookers, and slightly more characters per message would be trivial. Getting anybody to care would be an uphill slog. Same goes for something like Facebook.) Thanks to the ever more nuanced access control, cryptographic restriction, and analytics schemes available, the incumbent is in an excellent position to extract rents. Rent-seeking is generally a bad thing for everyone who isn't the rentier.
Now, I'm hard-pressed to shed a tear for the poor would-be twit-marketing millionaires who will be sucked dry by this; but the strong incentives to build structures from which rents can easily be extracted has its downsides. On the services side, outfits strive for lock-in; both in data portability issues, and in not integrating well with third parties, reducing effective customer choice. On the hardware side, we see the dangerous trend toward the manufacturer retaining cryptographic control over the device in perpetuity, and extracting fees for the privilege of doing various things(like selling software for the platform, or being able to play multiplayer games on your own hardware, with your own internet connection, that were once simply part of owning a computer).
The marketers might be the first to bleed(and they will, given their professional specialization in noise-making, certainly be the loudest); but they will not be the last.
Re:And nothing of value was lost (Score:1, Interesting)
Zynga would dispute that. They can shut up shop right now and the owners can walk away with hundreds of millions dollars in their pockets. Not bad for a few crap games that relied on social networking sites. They've made themselves a lot of money, which was their aim. Company longevity was never a concern.
Re:Sucks for this company... (Score:3, Interesting)