Twitter Tuesday - Ads on Twitter, Chirp Conference, and Twitter's Redesign

Holy schnikies, there's a lot to talk about this week! Twitter is making big moves, including releasing official Twitter mobile clients, announcing an advertising model, hosting a developer conference, and even leaking previews of a redesign. Let's cut the jibber-jabber and get to the good stuff.

Twitter Tuesday is go!

First things first: the ads. The new Twitter advertising system is called Promoted Tweets, and it allows companies to insert their tweets into the search results for certain terms. Eventually, some Promoted Tweets will end up in your Twitter stream, too. It sounds like a keyword model similar to the one Google uses.

There will be only one Promoted Tweet per page, and Twitter will obviously attempt to keep Promoted Tweets relevant to increasing clickthroughs and attracting more advertisers. To start off, Twitter has made deals with Best Buy, Virgin America, Starbucks, and Bravo.

This sounds like the end of the ad-free Twitter that we all knew was too good to be true. It also sounds like a fairly unobtrusive way of handling ads, but we'll have to see it in practice to know for sure. GigaOm has a few more details.



Next on our list is the Chirp Conference, which kicks off in San Francisco tomorrow. It should be an interesting event, considering the tensions between Twitter and its developers right now. After buying Tweetie and turning it into Twitter for iPhone, as well as creating an official Twitter client for BlackBerry, Twitter looks like it's moving in on territory that used to belong to indie devs. I'll be watching to see whether gathering the developers together at a conference -- the day after ads are announced, no less -- will make things better or worse. Tune in next week for the dramatic results.


Want a peek at Twitter's upcoming redesign? Designer Doug Bowman has leaked as much as he can without "giving away the farm" on his Dribbble account. This design isn't final, but I like what I see from this new profile page. More stats are always welcome, and they make it easier to decide whether to follow someone. Plus, the vain amongst us love to see our own stats. Navigation looks simpler, too; you can see Replies and Retweets next to one another near the left side of the screenshot. It looks good to me. What do you think?

With the big news revealed, it's time to sign off from this week's Twitter Tuesday. Because it's such an overwhelming week for Twitter, there may be some updates on this news before the next edition of the column, so keep your eye on Download Squad for the latest developments.

Tags: advertising, chirp, developers, redesign, twitter, twitter tuesday, TwitterTuesday