There’s a lot of buzz about Magpie, the new Twitter based advertising system that matches up twitter folks and those who follow them with advertisers. Jeremiah O has a good test and expresses reservations that Magpie is “self diminishing” and I think I’m inclined to agree. For most Twitter folks the money will be small and the distraction to users high enough that I think many would drop folks who use this to the extent their other social media efforts – and possibly their credibility – will be damaged.
I’m actually a big fan of the idea of targeted contextual ads, but skeptical that Magpie will be prudent enough to make this a truly “helpful” system for the viewers, whose only advantage is the prospect of a wonderfully targeted ad. Google and most sites, by contrast, allows you to *ignore the advertising area* where my take is that Magpie ads will appear in the twitter stream. They’ll be tagged “Magpie” so you could ignore all but the first line, but part of what makes Twitter enjoyable is that you generally do not have to filter out commercial content – if somebody is always posting commercial promo stuff I just dont’ follow them. Magpie makes that … hard to do.
That said I’d like to see somebody with a huge Twitter footprint try this out and then broadcast all the commentary. Hey Robert! Magpie is offering you big money based on their revenue calculator
I’m skeptical that Scoble would see even a tenth of the 30k+ Magpie lists but I promise not to stop following you _and_ if you donate some to charity I’ll match up to $500 of your first month magpie proceeds to help justify the experiment.