Twitter's Beacon - Have they missed the cluetrain?

About 2 years ago Facebook announced a 100 year revolution in Media, called Beacon. It was a way of trying to inject Ads into your friendship group and conversation stream. It also used the resulting transactions to build a database about you to on-sell. It went down very well. Not.

Well, Twitter has been moving that way, with 3 new steps:

(i) Registering twts on Google and Bing - for money.

(ii) Allowing the API to be used for Ad insertion by new Ad brokers (see our article earlier today)

(iii) and now, the New Retweet which essentially reards its most popular users and injects them into your twtstream without the context your friends can put on. It also acts like a "vote" system forr twts, so its more like Digg, and, as O'Reilly Radar points out, the Rich Get Richer and the proles get, well - lets just say that Twitter slides more towards Social Feudalism.

Mash this all together and you get some wonderful services - RT Ads into my stream and I can't avoid them (well, I can - I have to individually turn off the ability to see every person's RT individually - in my case that 400+ accounts to be updated.) No mass setup button there! And of course, all the transaction data can be mined and sold on.......

I rather loved this quote by a defender of the New, from Gawker:

"We are not trying to turn Facebook and Twitter into one giant spam network. All we are trying to do is get consumers to become marketers for us."

Its a recipe for spam, spam, glorious spam

I just knew that this would happen when Dick Costolo came on board, he did much the same for (to?) Feedburner, which was later bought by Google then quietly put to death when (surprise) it's once rapturous audience started to desert it.

Will this happen to Twitter? I don't know, it has a few architectural features that have allowed users to win the spam race so far:

(i) Unfollow people who are vexatious to your soul - but this won't help with RT spam

(ii) An open API so some smart people will no doubt soon start building Ad and RT blockers into 3rd party Twitter Readers

(iii) No doubt some enterprising soul - or a group - will use it in a new way that makes the Mindless RT'ng, Ad chomping people irrelevant. Redefine how to retweet, develop new social mores equivalent to telling your friends "look, if you come here advertising M&M's again you're out on you ear matey"

The question is, why is Twitter doing this so quickly with so much money in the bank to give it time to figure things out? Well, Mr Costolo's last trick was to stuff a datafeed business full of Ads and flog it to Google, so.....

A little while ago the Cluetrain Manifesto celebrated its 10th birthday. It was supposed to guide people towards a happier, more respectful attitude towards service users. Well, clearly Twitter - like Facebook before it - is no longer on the same page, or there is a ClueTrainwreck evolving slowly and it was all bollocks. The smart money seems to voting that its bollocks.

I wonder. As a customer I don't like the new RT, don't like Ads served to me surreptitiously, and am unhappy that Google and Bing are indexing every twt. Not so much "Ambient Intimacy" as "Ambient Interdiction". And other smart users seem to be saying the same....