Breaking Tweets retract their advertisement policy

On May 20th, Breaking Tweets, a twitter service that provides the latest news around the world announced a sponsorhip program. The following was written on their website breakingtweets.com:

… Those who sign up to be featured for at least one week, we’ll also tweet about you to our 5,000+ followers.

I reacted rather strongly to this and decided then to stop following @breakingtweets. I felt the wording on the website was made as such that my follow-ship was (rather bluntly) being made as a product.

Monetizing twitter is a fairly difficult task. Many have tried and many have failed (remember MagPie?). It’s a balancing act between earning incomes without distorting the core essence and image of the service that the account provides.

I was impressed to get a reply from Craig Kanalley (@ckanal), the founder of Breaking Tweets, one day after I twittered my strong opinion about the subject. He re-considered the policy and retracted some part of it:

In our sidebar, we’ll display your Twitter profile picture, account name, and a message of 140 characters or less, and link back to your profile page. This will be clearly visible on all pages of our site, next to the “Follow us” widget, and you can determine the length of the placement.

Follow Breaking Tweets on Twitter @breakingtweets.