Twitter says it will block 'paid tweets' pushed into timelines via API

Dead magpie. Will the Twitter version follow? Photo by Cyron on Flickr. Some rights reserved

Twitter is culling would-be advertising platforms that try to jump on its popularity by tweeting advertising messages via particular users.

In a posting to its company blog today, the company says (after a bit of shilly-shallying around on how important everyone has told it that clarity is; as though many companies get people saying "What we'd really like is for your strategy to be a lot more confusing, with products that have no rhyme or reason") that

"It is critical that the core experience of real-time introductions and information is protected for the user and with an eye toward long-term success for all advertisers, users and the Twitter ecosystem."

Which means that...

"For this reason, aside from Promoted Tweets, we will not allow any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API. We are updating our Terms of Service to articulate clearly what we mean by this statement, and we encourage you to read the updated API Terms of Service to be released shortly."

Nobody however can quite figure out yet which services there are which inject paid tweets via the Twitter API. Now, there are plenty which inject them into timelines of tweets - such as Magpie and Tweetup. What's not clear is whether that means they're doing it via the API.

It also means that apps which pay for themselves by including adverts which clearly aren't tweets (such as Iconfactory's Twitterrific) aren't affected; those aren't injected via the API, and they're not appearing as tweets.

So could it be Magpie? Magpie portrays itself as a simple way to get your ad out there on Twitter:

"Advertising on Twitter with Magpie is easy. Within a few steps you can have your campaign up and running. Once you have identified the opportunity simply propose a message, identify the conversation you want to join, decide how much you want to spend and then fund your campaign. We then select relevant twitterers and invite them to participate."

The question is whether sponsored tweets like that will have the boom lowered. Quite how Twitter is going to identify them is going to be interesting to watch, but it's clear that the company has now decided that it should be the one controlling where the ad revenues flow, and that if people want to advertise in actual tweets, they will have to go through them using its "Promoted Tweets" feature.

The analyst Michael Gartenberg says that Tweetup will also be a casualty; it lets advertisers buy search keywords. As Fast Company explained when Promoted Tweets appeared,

"The advertising enters the picture when a lesser-known but still credible source wants to secure more followers. That could be a small company trying to spread word of mouth, a young writer or critic, or simply someone like me who feels his insights on The West Wing are as good (better than, really) any "expert" out there. That person pays a small fee, based on number of views, and will get a bump into the expert search results. Not necessarily stuck at the top, either; the money buys increased visibility, it doesn't buy intrusion."

But now it looks like Twitter isn't going to allow anyone to do that. Again, the question is quite how it will filter out those added tweets - how it will distinguish from a group of people deciding it's #nickcleggsfault spontaneously and a group deciding that product X is super tasty! without human intervention (because humans don't scale, and Twitter must to make money).

Perhaps those will be revealed with the new terms of service. Between Facebook promising to update its privacy/publicity settings, and Twitter locking out the advertising platforms, it's an interesting time for the big names.