I, along with millions of other Twitter users, received a friendly email from Twitter co-founder Biz Stone this morning sharing the popular service’s new terms of service (TOS). In the basic terms area, they add (italics mine):

The Services may include advertisements, which may be targeted to the Content or information on the Services, queries made through the Services, or other information. The types and extent of advertising by Twitter on the Services are subject to change. In consideration for Twitter granting you access to and use of the Services, you agree that Twitter and its third party providers and partners may place such advertising on the Services or in connection with the display of Content or information from the Services whether submitted by you or others.

Before you scramble to your Twitter page to see what these ads look like, they add:

We’re leaving the door open for exploration in this area but we don’t have anything to announce.

Not only are ads going to be a distinctly probable possibility, but contextual and behavioral targeting are also being hinted at, too. It’s been a few years since Google raised hackles by announcing they’d serve up contextual advertising on Gmail (the furor has died down), but behavioral targeting moves beyond simple content matching on the page/tweet and might additionally look at patterns of searching and browsing behavior over time and potentially across sites and services. Since it’s been less than a year since Oprah gave Twitter a green light, it’s safe to say that Mr Stone and the rest of the management will move cautiously, especially since Congress is currently drafting a bill that would tackle behavioral targeting’s privacy issues.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 11th, 2009 at 9:09 am and is filed under Online Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.