Paid Shilling Comes to Twitter

An anonymous reader alerts us that an outfit called Magpie is paying Twitter users to tout advertisers' products. Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb has identified a number of household-name companies — among them Apple, Skype, Kodak, Cisco, Adobe, Roxio, PC Tools, and Box.net — whose products are hyped by identically worded, paid Magpie tweets. But comments to Kirkpatrick's post, including one from a Box.net spokesman, make it sound likely that these shills were paid for not by the companies themselves, but by affiliate marketers. That may not matter. In the same way that Belkin recently got burned paying consumers to write complimentary online reviews about the company's products, the makers of products and services touted through Magpie may find themselves tainted in the backlash from this new form of astroturfing. Kirkpatrick concludes his post: "So there's the Twitter-sphere for you! Bring on 'real time search,' bring on a globally connected community, bring on vapid, vile, stupid shilling. It all seems pretty sad to me."

meh

[Anonymous Coward]

And this is exactly why I recently switched to http://identi.ca/ [identi.ca] which is a FOSS/public domain version of twitter that an increasing number of geeks are switching to. Twitter is *so* five minutes ago.

Re:Twitter?

[edmazur]

Because it couldn't possibly be that Apple users like the products, is that the thinking?

The messages are all identical.

Image FTA: Apple tweets [readwriteweb.com]

Re:New medium?

[deadboy2000]

It's revolutionary in the same sense that big, patent-leather handbags (or whatever) are revolutionary. It's fashion, it's hype, it's a fad, it's the latest hottest thing that you have to be excited about right now or else you're just hopelessly lame.

Re:Erris, Mactrope, deadzero...

[Megane]

At least Twitter is so obvious that you know when they are around. Does anybody else use M$ any more apart from Twitter's sock puppets?

http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2002/20020722h.gif [penny-arcade.com]