In June, furniture store Habitat published tweets with tags related to the protests in Iran. Twitter users are encouraged to mark the topic of their posts with a hash-tag such as "#iran", and twitter.com keeps a chart of the most popular ("trending topics"). Users often click on tags in the top ten to find out what they're about, being taken to a sampling of Twitter posts (tweets). If you can get on this list, there's the chance that a lot of people will read you - Twitter seems increasingly popular as a news source whether you're interested in the latest celebrity death or political protest. Habitat's Twitter feed displayed messages tied to the protests over Iranian elections, such as: "HabitatUK: #MOUSAVI Join the database for free to win a £1,000 gift card." Habitat apologised and claimed they had no knowledge of this promotion but refused to say who was responsible. (BBC; Register)
According to The Register, One Riot (a Colorado-based search engine for Twitter and similar social media sites) is offering Habitat's morally-dubious strategy to everybody, with its new idea: "trending ads". Described as "a stream of ads that are related to trending topics as they emerge across the social web", the idea is that a company provides a marketing message (like "win a gift card!") and One Riot links it to trending topics. A spokesman for One Riot linked his service to dead actress Brittany Murphy, telling the Register "As an advertiser, you have no way of knowing that the everyone is going to be searching for Brittany Murphy. You can't build ads ahead of time. We index your site and then build the ads for you."
One of the risks of any open medium is that people will try to use it to make money, and that the advertising messages may overwhelm the content, destroying the utility of the original source - many people feel this way about email, faced with the endless spam. In a method similar to that of One Riot, each big news event (the death of Michael Jackson, Tiger Woods' infidelity) is accompanied by unsolicited email whose subject line or content promising salacious video or images, only to lead you to some dodgy online store or compromised website, or trick you into downloading a virus. It's a battle that web search also has to fight, with Google constantly tweaking its systems to remove scraper sites and link farms.
Already, the majority of Twitter users seem to be selling something: Twitter does allow you to exchange messages with your friends in a little closed world, but plans for Twitter to be used as an advertising and market research platform require people to continue to interact more openly, to use hash tags and see what other people are writing about. Without people like One Riot, Twitter will go bankrupt, but with them it may not have any genuine users. Twitter has shown signs of being the conscience of the internet; it will be ironic if it starts making money from dead celebrities and political protests. Mainstream news media always sell more copies when it's bad news, but they don't promise to put a photo of the latest corpse in the middle of your press ad.
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