#magpie = $$$ OR unfollow?
Written on 3rd November 2008
4 COMMENTS 
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Last week a new Twitter Money making scheme launched by a company named Magpie. You give them your Twitter account data and they insert regular commercial messages in between your own tweets. They get access to your loyal followers, you both make money.
You can imagine that this sparked some controversy amongst the Twitter audience. One thing the company did very well was include a simple test to find out how much your Twitter account is worth. Our results are here on the right:
Even people who hate the idea of selling their tweets couldn’t resist checking their virtual worth and sharing that with their followers. The result: everybody is talking about Magpie and I’m sure they get a lot of sign-ups. Whether they have enough advertisers is another story though. All Magpie commercial messages are preceded by #magpie and the only ads you currently see are for their own service. You can see this yourself by searching for #magpie. (UPDATE: looks like they found some advertisers. I see lots of different ads now.)
One thing a lot of people are wondering about is how many followers you would lose by using Magpie so we decided to set-up an account for our own Twitter username and will let you know what the result is in 30 days. We now have 1280 followers on Twitter and gain about 5 new followers a day. We should have 1512 followers by November 30. We will let you know how this turns out.
Here are some of the mixed reactions to Magpie on Twitter:
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By Ernst-Jan Pfauth on Nov 3, 2008
unfollow @nextweblog
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You traitor!
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By Cory O'Brien on Nov 4, 2008
I’m pretty adamantly anti-Magpie: http://thefutureofads.com/2008.....ork-fails/
I don’t think I’m necessarily against Twitter users getting paid for promoting products in their stream, but I do feel that the automatic and autonomous way that Magpie places ads goes against the true spirit of Twitter.
In addition, I think it devalues both Twitter as a service, and Twitter users that decide to use Magpie, because it turns the service, which has otherwise remained rather spam free, into a virtual spam factory, with friends willingly spamming their friends and contacts for a few extra dollars a month.
It’s interesting to see the community debate the service in such an open and public way, as we are all acting as the gatekeepers for a service that none of us own (except of course @EV I guess) so I’m interested to hear both sides of the argument, but for now, I’m a firm voter for No on Magpie.
- @coryobrien
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By Dennis on Dec 29, 2008
So.. did it work???
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