Alex Schleber

"Great post, Louis, I am totally with you on the intelligent targeting issue, and how stupid and wasteful nearly all Web advertising has been up to this point (with the exception of Google Search ads, those work to an extent because of the different mindset inherent in the act of searching...there is a reason why Google has been raking it in with Adwords). If what I read about the proposed system on Robert's blog today is right, then Twitter may well have figured out the formula to making this work. It is ESSENTIAL to give people more of what they were already looking at when they "raised their hand". Context is everything. It would be nice if someone did it right for a change (check out what I wrote about the problem of dumb Web content monetization some months ago: http://businessmindhacks.com/post...... ). Because it might also SHAME all of the others into upping their game, where steep revenue declines alone still haven't managed to do so..." - Alex Schleber

"Except when Twitter then kills that client by violating terms of service for accessing their API... Seriously, it's all in the execution. If it becomes clear that this is something new, that the ads are mostly useful, and that Twitter is keeping a tight lid on things so that there are minimal shenanigans, then all is well." - Alex Schleber

"A few things: 1) Bots are already being outed more and more due to the list count. High followers (due to refollow spamming), plus high tweet count (due to autoposting from twitterfeed, etc.), but only on 10 lists = Bot. And you just block them. Been doing a lot more of that lately as they are outing themselves more than before (anything from twitterfeed is suspect, unless its a declared blog RSS feed or similar). 2) If Twitter is smart and turns on per advertiser blocking as I described further up, that solves the problem, along with just blocking the source (fake user) of too many tweets. And if a given "user" has too many ads blocked from his stream, Twitter could manually take a look & intervene. 3) One would think that Twitter could easily throttle this in their set-up, that only x tweets per hour at most will be targeted, even if more were target-worthy (there will be many that won't be in everyday short conversation)." - Alex Schleber

"Here is a great idea: Use something that is already totally familiar to every Twitter user - blocking. This time of specific advertisers. If I hate a specific ad, I just click a block button by the ad. It's great for me, and great for Twitter not to try showing me something I have no interest/etc. in again. They get to continuously refine their click-through rates! BTW I think that blocking in general is a totally underappreciated and underdeveloped function in social media, e.g. Twitter should have long ago allowed us to see our own "block page", with a list of users we have blocked. That way, each blocking action could be ONE click, no pop-up (they have gotten better on this with the most recent UI changes), and could be reversed in case of error or later changing one's mind. Maybe it should just be called "muting" so as to not sound so drastic..." - Alex Schleber

"The genius of this (if I understand Robert's description correctly) is that you'd never have to see an ad at all unless you'd want to. It would be your option to click on/mouse-over/surface the meta-data add-on package. By your ACTION you'd be declaring intent: Let's see what Twitter might have cooked up for me "underneath" this tweet. Then if it's intelligently targeted to the content of the tweet (and I agree that this is still a big if), you may well be delighted. And even if it's not for you, it won't feel like someone was completely wasting your time." - Alex Schleber

"Ari, no, you still wouldn't have a material connection: If you use Twitter's new retweet function, all credit remains with the original tweet author anyway (and he/she didn't place the ad either). But even if you use the old way (which I prefer BTW), then Twitter can simply assign a new or similar, or even the same ad to the "add-on payload", but you still won't have a material connection because you're not endorsing. Deck shuffled anew so to speak. All of this of course predicated on the premise that Twitter is going to do a revenue share in the first place. They could clearly just say that that is the cost of using the service." - Alex Schleber