I should be in bed with a headache, but this rankles too much…

Calacanis is barking mad crazy, and Hugh Macleod is inexplicably potty if he really (as opposed to sarcastically) agrees with Jason:

1. In feed advertising
Imagine if every 10th, 20th, or 100th tweet was an advertisement. Would that be so horrible? No, not at all. “your free Twitter account is brought to you by Apple’s iPhone” would be perfectly acceptable to users and advertisers on the web. These ads will get solid click through if targeted well…. also they could be display/visual ads that really “pop” off the page since Twitter pages are text based (as opposed to say Flickr where the graphical ads would compete with the photos).

2. SMS Advertising
Users would be perfectly fine if every 100-200 or so SMS Tweets they got an advertisement. If/when Twitter turns on SMS advertising they will have the largest independent inventory of SMS advertising in the world. You think Google or a carrier mighty be interested in that?

If Twitter goes in those directions then they will have fired the starting pistol for their own doom; what will happen is simple: people will start doing “Twitter” for themselves; protocols will arise to allow shared groups statuses (statii?) over (for instance) XMPP, and the social gravity which supports Twitter will dissipate exponentially rapidly.

At best they may maintain some control over their half-life – how long it will take to lose half of their users, and then half of what remains – but decay is inevitable and will be rapid. Maybe they could milk some cash out of it on the way down, whilst they are pissing-off their userbase? Not a good plan for growth…

What’s the alternative? Beats me. Telling people how to do their job, is not my job.

Telling them how not to fuck up, however, is…

ps: anyone remembers that some folk have to pay to receive SMSes? Or will advertising subsidise that, too?