Is Your Twitter Stream Worth $50?

I wasn’t entirely comfortable with the MacHeist TweetBlast when I saw it yesterday.

The TweetBlast, for those of you unfamiliar with it, is a simple concept. All you have to do is post a tweet on Twitter using a particular phrase, which in this case is: “@MacHeist Yeah, I’ll take a free copy of DEVONthink! http://macheist.com/tweetblast #MacHeist #free”

And once you’ve done that, you can claim a license code for DEVONthink worth just shy of 50 bucks.

A good deal? I’m not so sure.

It’s working for MacHeist, that’s for sure. As I write this, over 19,000 people have tweeted their support and got themselves the free app. And it’s probably worked for Devon Technologies, whose work I greatly admire. Devonthink is a fantastic application and deserves all the raving support it gets. All these new licenses will be a valuable resource when it comes to the next Devonthink updates; think of all that upgrade income.

It should be noted at this point that the free license you get via the ‘Heist is for version 1.x, and that version 2.0 has been in beta recently and will probably be officially released soon.

Cynics will accuse the Devon people of trying to pull a fast one here, but I don’t think they’re doing anything wrong. It’s very clear on their web site what the situation is: and you’re still getting a free copy of an excellent app. No-one will be forcing you to upgrade to version 2.

My concerns, though, are with the way the thing is done. By asking people to turn their Twitter streams into advertising billboards, the MacHeisters are damaging the community there. Twitter’s supposed to be about the sharing of status, it’s all about conversation. I find it sad to see it being co-opted by commercialism. Sad, but not surprising.

The more Twitter grows, the more advertisers are going to try and game it. I don’t want the people I follow to be tempted into doing the spammers’ work for them. I don’t want to see advertising where I expected to see real people.

I’ve said this before, in other places: in my opinion, advertising that works online does so because it respects the context it finds itself in. The TweetBlast, and other promotions like it, disrupt that context. They look out of place because they are. When I see that kind of advertising, it makes me want to avoid the product mentioned, not buy it.