Terry Pearson’s Blog

Twitter Pollution

Excessive targeted marketing using a social network’s status updates.

Most people have at least heard of Twitter by now. The mini social network seemed like a great idea when it was born out of Odeo (a podcasting company). It can be highly addictive, and can even save you money on your text messaging bill.

Twitter does have a major problem. The biggest of these is money. As of this writing, Twitter still has not found a way to generate income. If Twitter does find a way to generate advertising revenue, will it’s users continue to embrace the service?

But an even bigger problem looms for the messaging site. Twitter has opened the floodgates of a very open protocal. Marketing companies, universities, and even politicians are utilizing the networking site to flood users with advertising. As twitter grows more popular, more companies and organizations will get on board.

Unless something drastically changes, Twitter will likely see it’s peak within one to two years. Afterwards, it is quite possible that user-ship will decrease as as rapidly as advertising (from inside and outside) increases.

The biggest problem with advertisements on Twitter is that there are no “banners”. Banners were designed to take a portion of the message on a website and turn it into revenue.

With only 140 characters per message, there is no way to insert advertising into these messages. Therefore, advertisers are forced to send separate messages for advertisements. This is the equivilent of a website sending popup messages throughout the day because you accessed the website at some point. Nobody would agree to such a proposition.

This advertising can be seen as “Twitter Pollution.” Unfortunately, Twitter itself may be the final casualty of Twitter pollution.

Bill Seeks to Let FDIC Borrow up to $500 Billion – WSJ.com.

I just saw the most amazing recipe. This is truly a “killed by good food” recipe if I ever saw one. It’s called Bacon Explosion.

It’s a mixture of layers of Beef and Bacon, formed into a giant “Sub” sandwich style piece of meet.

Mmmmmm…. Calories!

My wife posted her own version of “Hi/Lo Thursday” found on the Riggs Family Blog. She asked me to do the same. Check out their blog to read everyone else’s “Hi/Lo” posts and for a chance to win $100.

My HIGHS for the week:

Jessica gave me a bunch of candy yesterday and today. It was like valentines day twice in a row, and it’s not even valentines day yet.

I got to spend the evening with Abigail while Jessica was out and about tonight. She had a lot of fun crawling around, playing her keyboard, and watching me play guitar.

I have a feeling that the best days of the week will be starting tomorrow. My family will be going up to a cabin North of Duluth. I love going to the cabin with my relatives. We end up playing strategy games, staying up late, and more.

My Low for the week:

Well, this is not a major issue (by some accounts) but my jeep started to make loud sounds when going over bumps. We took it to a great mechanic, and he diagnosed it as a problem with the links to the stabalizer bar. He said it would be about a $200 repair.

The good news is that it does not jeapordize our saftey, so we can wait a couple weeks and bring it in when it is convenient and when we have the cash to fix it.