The direct effect of Twitter ads isn't that bad; by the standards of web advertising it's hardly intrusive. It's the probable side effects of optimising for that revenue stream that are the trouble. One of Twitter's virtues from an advertiser's perspective is that most recent Tweets are often barely more compelling than than whatever message or link they're trying to promote. Streams which efficiently filter out irrelevance mitigate against that[1]. Reverse chronological order with ads interspersed is probably a local optimum for ad discoverability, and I bet the marketing guys test that....
Same goes for the risks of allowing any old third party to build the next successful Twitter platform on their API when they know "filter out the ads" is going to be a much-requested feature.
Being more controversial, I still can't help thinking that whilst Twitter has long made a virtue of brevity, 140 characters is just too restrictive for the average non-regular user. It's often not enough to convey the reason why people should go to an obfuscated link, never mind enough for a person not used to truncating their thoughts to express a view that doesn't involve an image or a third party site. I'm not interested in receiving Tweets by SMS, but would find Twitter streams a whole lot more engaging if they tended to be 250-400 characters.
[1]of course this is what the portal promoters thought in the pre Google era. But since then Facebook and LinkedIn's heavily polluted streams have been highly successful, and Twitter has even less potential to become primarily a search tool rather than a way to stumble over moderately interesting content, some of it promoted.
Same goes for the risks of allowing any old third party to build the next successful Twitter platform on their API when they know "filter out the ads" is going to be a much-requested feature.
Being more controversial, I still can't help thinking that whilst Twitter has long made a virtue of brevity, 140 characters is just too restrictive for the average non-regular user. It's often not enough to convey the reason why people should go to an obfuscated link, never mind enough for a person not used to truncating their thoughts to express a view that doesn't involve an image or a third party site. I'm not interested in receiving Tweets by SMS, but would find Twitter streams a whole lot more engaging if they tended to be 250-400 characters.
[1]of course this is what the portal promoters thought in the pre Google era. But since then Facebook and LinkedIn's heavily polluted streams have been highly successful, and Twitter has even less potential to become primarily a search tool rather than a way to stumble over moderately interesting content, some of it promoted.