Twitter is watching

Reading past posts on the Marker blog one would come to believe that we are truly obsessed with Twitter – and the truth is that a few of us here are. I have always seen Twitter as a rather clean web experience, free from the days of MySpace bands constantly trying to spam you with music you didn’t want to hear and other nasties. I did however run into my first “big brother is watching” experience last week:

After posting an early morning tweet about an experience I had at the airport the night before, I immediately received a reply from an account I had never seen or heard of. As you can see, this account is clearly searching for the keyword “airport” within peoples tweets and then replying back with instructions on using their service.

I have to admit that I am rather mixed up on my opinions about this. My first thought was that this is an amazing idea – being able to target keywords and serve ads to people on Twitter opens up a huge market.

On the flip-side however you can see how wrong this instance of keyword based advertising got it. No “Boarding”, I’m not waiting at the airport, and I don’t really care about other Twitter travelers – thanks though.

This could open up some pretty interesting advertising opportunities in the future, but lets hope it is used for good rather than evil – otherwise we’ll soon be seeing an “only accept replies from friends” option in Twitter, circa MySpace 2005 very soon.