Twitter to block ‘paid tweets’

The microblogging service is beginning to flex its muscles against advertising platforms that use its API.

Twitter has gaining constant popularity worldwide with 140 character broadcast to followers. It is sometimes described as SMS of the Internet. But at the same time Twitter is probably one of the most abused social networks because of its poor API. There are lots of business built around this API where you can do really good business like paid retweets. You could see people retweet content that they don’t read. But that going to change. Third-party ad networks have been officially banned from Twitter, according to a post on the Twitter blog on Monday from Chief Operating Officer Dick Costolo.

“We will not allow any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API,” the post read, explaining that the exception will be Twitter’s own “promoted tweets” program that it announced earlier this year.

“Third party ad networks are not necessarily looking to preserve the unique user experience Twitter has created,” Costolo’s post read.”They may optimize for either market share or short-term revenue at the expense of the long-term health of the Twitter platform. For example, a third party ad network may seek to maximize ad impressions and click through rates even if it leads to a net decrease in Twitter use due to user dissatisfaction.”

Prior to its unveiling of the Promoted Tweets advertising program, Twitter announced that it had acquired iPhone client Tweetie and would launch other official mobile clients as well.