A blog post on Jim Kukral's blog The Daily Flip discusses a marketing experiment he is running on Twitter.com.  I found out about this blog post because I follow Jim Kukral on Twitter.com and he posted a link to the post on Twitter.  Before I start what is probably going to be a rant, I think I should probably explain Twitter to the uninitiated. Twitter is a Micro-Blogging platform. What that means is that you send status updates called tweets, whenever you have the time. These tweets have to be under 140 characters. The basic question of Twitter is "What are you doing now?" This sounds strange to people who are not Twitterers, but there's something powerful about Twitter that's hard to describe to people who don't use it. The most amazing thing about Twitter is the sense of community. You feel like you belong to something much greater, and the more followers you have, the more you feel that way.

In his blog post Kukral talks about an experiment he is doing. It's basically a Twitter Bot called "Twitter Me This" that will tweet out a trivia question. The first person to respond correctly wins $5. While this, in and of itself isn't bad, the reason he's doing it has raised my eyebrows at least. It's a marketing experiment. He's basically testing whether Twitter is a viable target for marketing. This, for me, is beyond the pale. While people are used to online communities being used to generate profit, there seems to me an almost sacred duty to prevent this from happening from Twitter. Why this much emotional investment in something that in the large scheme of things is pretty minor?

I think it begins with the community. Unlike blogs or social networking sites, Twitter seems real. I know intimate details about people on Twitter that I'd never know from reading their blogs. I've met their girlfriends on Twitter. I've chatted with people about their feelings over the Chinese Olympics. I've suggested a method to get baby snot off a Palm Treo. In other words, it's a lot like what I do in real life. Conversation is about give and take. You talk, I respond, you listen, you respond, etc. Twitter does that on a massive scale. It's possible to track a hundred conversations or more. There's a sense of fellowship on Twitter. This isn't like a chat room, where there's a group conversation.  Instead, it's like simultaneously talking to your Mom, your Sister, your best friend, and ten random strangers about totally different things, and this conversation is entirely in the public eye. Anyone can read the public timeline.