Top Stories for the Week of April 12-16, 2010

Suddenly, Twitter is acting like a real company, rather than the free toy that comes in Ashton Kutcher's box of Cap'n Crunch. To begin: they're gonna carry ads and try to make money. "What took so long?" asks Twitterrati. "Advertising is a no-brainer for Twitter, and something few Twitter users will complain about. After all, we're getting a free service so what's to complain about if a few ads appear here and there?" Really? GeekSugar explains that "Promoted Tweets" will "display when users search for certain words or terms purchased by advertisers... Eventually, relevant advertisements will show up in users' Twitter streams." Is that horrible? Groundswell says "this is NOT the first sign of the apocalypse. Of all the places Twitter could includes ads, this is the least obtrusive." The Steve Rubel Stream concurs: "They could have been a lot more aggressive by focusing only on display [ads] or rich media, but they chose a more measured, contextual approach, which I think will help them in the long run."

This week Twitter also had its own business conference, just like a professional corporation, called Chirp (ok, kind of like a professional corporation). Among other things that happened at Chirp, company co-founder Biz Stone made public some secret numbers, Paid Content relates: Twitter has 105,779,710 registered users--adding 300,000 a day. About 60 percent come from outside the U.S. Only a quarter access the site via Twitter.com, as opposed to a third-party Twitter client. That's key because third-party Twitter clients will be able to choose whether or not to distribute the new ads - if they do they get a 50-50 split of ad revenue. Oh wait--forget everything we just said. Twitter COO Dick Costolo insists says Promoted Tweets aren't ads. Ah, right. "Oh gag me," begs Business Insider.

If ads aren't going to get Twitter users upset, what will? How about Twitter giving its archive of every Tweet ever to an arm of the U.S. Government. "Have you ever sent out a 'tweet' on the popular Twitter social media service? Congratulations: Your 140 characters or less will now be housed in the Library of Congress," proclaims the Library of Congress Blog. Whuck? It's "a move that's clearly intended to out-postmodern MoMA's acquisition of the @ symbol" says VF Daily. Mashable gives the archive a thumbs up, saying this "reinforces the importance of the information we share in 140 characters or less. In many ways history can be relived through tweets, and now the Library of Congress can ensure that not a single character is lost in the sea of real-time information." The Next Web says "it seems wrong" but not how you think: "It seems wrong for an archive of people's thoughts, feelings, opinions and actions... from all corners of the world... to be maintained by one country's official library. It feels unjust." Boy, all the injustice in the world, and now this.

Don't worry--Google says it will index all of Twitter, too, and present Tweets throughout history in a handy timeline format, says Download Squad. "You might not be excited that people can find all the mean things you said about your boss before he discovered Twitter. Don't worry, though, deleting a tweet will wipe it out of Google's results, too." So maybe Google got some ideas from the government of China after all.

Twitter came recently in reference to one Anthony Weiner, a New York congressman and frequent Daily Show guest who is getting a reputation as media's "the go-to liberal spitfire" and the Democrats' answer to Sarah Palin, according to Gothamist (what was the question?). Part of the huzzah is based on a NY Observer piece in which Weiner grabbed the mic at a downtown club and said he follows the Tea Party on Twitter and tweets in "just to f#% with them." That, of course, has always been a popular use of Twitter.

Moving off Twitter for a nanosecond, Google boss Eric Schmidt this week told newspaper editors that their industry will bounce back. "Schmidt showered praise on the industry, calling journalism an "art," reported Politico. "Schmidt said he reads three newspapers, and called their work indispensible. And he blasted blogs, saying that any questions about the value of newspaper editors can be answered: "Look at the blog world." Google's CEO, which owns a huge blogging software company, blasting away? Okie-dokie.

And something called the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, or WOMMA, apparently did something ironic by spamming its members with voice mail robo-calls. Several steamed recipients spread some angry word of mouth via Twitter, and marketing expert Seth Godin on his blog called whole thing bad form--then called WOMMA. "When I spoke to their Executive Director, she had a hard time understanding that what they were doing was spam," he writes. "In case you missed the first part of our show, the future of marketing is based on permission. It's based on sending messages to people who want to get them." By the way, Godin weighs in on Twitter ads too: "If I ran Twitter, I'd build my new ad service about a socially acceptable way for corporate users to build large lists of followers." Twitter, he says, has "permission from users to be a bridge between the user and those that might want to talk to them. That's a powerful place to be. Using cheap technology to spam people is not."

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