Product Tweetment: Shilling in 140 characters

A day after I was telling someone how I actually have come to like Twitter, for its snapshot of what everyone's reading and saying, comes the party's-over news that people are getting paid to Tweet about various products.

We've seen it in the blogosphere. So why not Twitter?

ReadWriteWeb got onto to this by noticing that a testimonial about Skype redirected readers to a service called Magpie, which pays people to write about different products.

Using a search engine for Tweets, ReadWriteWeb found loads more paid product placements -- for Apple, the Flip camera, Box.net, StubHub and FatCow.

If you can't trust faux friends named hippiegirljess who can you trust?

ReadWriteWeb rants:

So there's the Twitter-sphere for you! Bring on "real time search," bring on a globally connected community, bring on vapid, vile, stupid shilling. It all seems pretty sad to me. And to the advertisers out there - is this cynical scheme the best you can do to engage with all the new ways people are communicating online? That's pretty bad.

Finding a song for this was positively easy. Bobby?