I just deleted my Magpie account – with only one ad served. My reasoning is twofold: first, It was bothersome to me that I was apprehensive about seeing an ad placed in my name that my followers wouldn’t appreciate. Secondly, and the main reason I quite, is that Twitter doesn’t yet make money off of the people who use it. Sooner or later they will and hopefully their business model will include a way for the users to get a percentage. If not then I’ll sign up for a service like Magpie.

A few of you may have noticed that I signed up for Magpie the other day.

Magpie is a Twitter ad service that Twitter users can sign up for. Magpie will insert ads into the Twitter stream on your behalf at a rate the user can determine. The default rate is one ad per 5 twits. The user makes money depending on the number of followers they have and the keywords used.

When I signed up it estimated that I would make just a little over £100/month which I think translates into something like 5 billion US dollars. :-) At any rate, I’m going to try it out for a month to see how many people unfollow me and how much money I actually do make. I’ll be sure to post the results back here.

I’m wondering what people think of this service. Obviously no one is saying, “Cool, more ads. I can’t wait.” I’ve read another post about it and people in the comments seem pretty bent on hating it. I personally don’t see what the big frakking deal is. If everyone I follow signed up for it then I’d see about one ad every five minutes. I can deal with that.

I’m interested in seeing how this pans out in the long run. Something like this could be squashed pretty quick if Twitter clients added a feature to simply block out any tweet with #magpie in it. Even better, just add an input field so that each user can type in terms that they want the client to ignore. That way as new services come out the users could just update their “blocked words” and problem solved. Plus it would come in handy if you really hate the show Heroes, or something like, you could enter that word and any tweets with heroes in it would be skipped.

According to ReadWriteWeb about 56% of Twitterers use the browser. I’ll bet that number goes down quick as twitter spam becomes more of an issue, assuming Twitter clients can help block it. There’s also Twalala to help those stuck on the browser.

Of all the components that are supplied by Adobe the one that is missing is an Ads component. Something we can drop into our Flex/AIR apps to display ads and make some money off our work.

Here’s how I would see it working:

• I would sign up with Adobe, just as I would with Google Ads, for an affiliate account
• Then all I need to do is place the ad component in my app and give it my affiliate number
• I could also use data binding to feed it keywords to target the ad content
• I could specify certain ad attributes: media type – text, Flash, video, etc.
• Both me and Adobe Make some money

The component would also need to know if it’s in an AIR app and if so then cache some ads in case the user is offline. Then if the user clicks on an ad in offline mode the component would have to store that click and inform the user that they will get more info when they go back online. Or something like that.

The upshot is that Adobe becomes an ad server and will make money off it. Plus we developers will be able to easily place ads in our work and make some money so that we won’t have to work for the man.

Yes, you could do this would Google ads but it would take some work. Wouldn’t you rather have a nice component built by Adobe?

Hey Adobe. Why haven’t you produced any hardware? Everyone else is doing it. (I’m sure Google is thinking about it.)

Here’s my wish: Adobe produces a sleek little handheld that runs off a Linux core. For the most part it’s just a music/video player. But of course the greatness of this little device would be that the GUI is all Flash/Flex. And that’s a good name for it to: The Device.

So, Adobe, the key here is that you publish the API that talks to all the hardware and let us Flash Freaks mash it up into the greatest little device on the planet. Who knows what hundreds of thousands of designers/developers could come up with. One second it’s a phone and the next it’s a tri-corder.

Tell you what, you guys start thinking about it and let me know where to send my $500. I’ll buy one right now and you send it to me when you get it built. I’m not joking.