Give me one good reason why people should allow a 3rd party service to send ads through to their personal Twitter stream. Seriously. Give me a good reason. I honestly can't think of anything remotely useful or beneficial for it and if I see ads being tweeted by someone I almost always will immediately unfollow them. Keep in mind that I'm talking about personal accounts, not services or marketing accounts, of which obviously live off of advertising.

The immediately unfollowing thing may sound harsh, but I'm just not interested in learning about whitening my teeth or entering in lottery sweepstakes in 140 characters or less. It just seems so artificial to read those, even if the person actually tweets regularly about their daily life. It's actually even more strange if they do tweet often amongst all the ads because it throws their "voice" off. Like this:

tweeter1234: I had a donut today, it was yum! 19 minutes ago
tweeter1234: My dog just ran around in circles, soo funny! Video: *link* 5 minutes ago
tweeter1234: Ad: WANNA MAKE MORE CASH FAST? *LINK OMG!* #ad 2 minutes ago
tweeter1234: Gonna order pizza probably. 32 seconds ago

Yay donuts! Haha funny video! Wait... cash? WTF just happened. Seriously, not every little bit of life has to be commercialized. The great thing about Twitter is that you can get a sense of who people are, how they think, what they are about. Why would you want to spoil that "open door" to your followers by slamming them with ads that have NO possible relation to you or your life?

I've seen ad companies pop up that say they will tweet ads that you or your followers would be interested in, but honestly that's not much better. They are still advertisements and honestly it really cheapens the rest of your updates. Whatever value your followers felt your tweets held before, it's probably difficult to consider them the same way now.

I attribute this to my extreme dislike for personal blogs with ads or Pay-Per-Post type entries. If you're going to do that kind of blogging, I really believe it should be completely separate from your more personal posts. Why? It cheapens the value of your site and content just like tweeting ads on Twitter. It's not like you're promoting an organization/cause or just talking about a favorite product... it's obvious that the tweet or post is "fake". Compared to how your other posts/tweets sound, you probably wouldn't have wanted to write about this superfabulous teeth whitening product in the first place. Tacky, in my opinion.

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