Twitter to implement search advertising

Twitter has recently announced it will soon begin offering search advertisements in its search results. This means that advertisers and people can pay/bid on keywords, and those tweets will appear at the top of the search results of Tweets on the Twitter service. The Twitter search advertisements will begin as a select beta named “Promoted Tweets”

I knew the day would come when Twitter would have some sort of ads on its site. Afterall, we have been living in Twitter ad free bliss. It looks however that this will be beginning to come to an end as Twitter has decided to monetize their site with an advertising platform which in my opinion is the wrong move for them.

I would be more then happy to pay 5-10 bucks per month for Twitter as long as I didn’t have to deal with any advertisements. however, it seems Twitter didn’t explore this option. It has been my experience that advertising is not safe on the internet today. I toyed around with a few ads on this blog, but i decided against it because the rewards received don’t justify the means of the privacy implications of my visitors and users are just sick of advertisements.

I think the “Promoted Tweet” feature will do nothing but hurt Twitter in the future going down the line. Twitter is supposed to be a place where one can observe and interact with the “noise of the world” in an unbiased manner. Instead, select pices of noise will be promoted to the top of the results for those who are willing to pay for it, and this will indeed hurt the Twitter community as a whole.

One other thing to consider is advertisements have lead to the propagation of malware. These Malvertisements have been the bane of computer users over the last year. In fact, I have fixed more computers infected with Rogue Security Applications in the last 3 weeks then I have in the 6 months prior. There are just new versions of these Rogues coming out at an ever increasing pace. what will stop some scammer from promoting a tweet to his wonderful Rogue Security Application for your consumption. Just think, you click the promoted tweet, and your greeted with a page that exploits a vulnerability or overloads you with pop ups saying your infected with 500 viruses. In most circumstances, one click on any of those windows usually results in ownage unless your system is configured correctly.

So this is the future we have to look forward to from Twitter….I don’t like sponsored search results much..hopefully Google won’t include these “Promoted Tweets” in their search results.