Twitter Launches Online Form to Buy Ads, Trending Topics & More. The business end of Twitter has revamped its website tonight and it now includes a form that companies can use to express interest in purchasing Promoted Accounts, Promoted Tweets or Promoted Trends.
Would-be advertisers are asked to select from 5 categories of monthly ad budget, ranging from below $10k through over $100k, and choose whether they would like their campaigns to begin in 1 to 4 weeks, 1 to 3 months or 3 months from now. This may be the real time web, but real-time advertisers, apparently, are still best advised to pick up the phone with credit card in hand.
The ad buying page is so fresh and new that the "thank you" page you're sent to after completing the form just shows a page not found error. I've always been a fan of the way Twitter offers advertising, in its early experiments at least. Trending topics and tweets both sit beside an open discourse about the advertiser themselves, and promoted accounts are only promoted when relevant. Twitter survived an attack from Anonymous last night (pic) cc. Wikileaks: Twitter explains why it's not trending, as hackers play cat and mouse. Twitter has officially posted on its blog about the fact that the #wikileaks hashtag has not been continually trending.
The topic has been the source of anger among some people who have insisted that the company is censoring its "trending topics", possibly under pressure from the US government. "This week, people are wondering about WikiLeaks, with some asking if Twitter has blocked #wikileaks, #cablegate or other related topics from appearing in the list of top Trends. "The answer: Absolutely not. In fact, some of these terms, including #wikileaks and #cablegate, have previously trended either worldwide or in specific locations. " The company explains: "Twitter Trends are automatically generated by an algorithm that attempts to identify topics that are being talked about more right now than they were previously.
So what makes a trend a Trend? Thoughts on the DOJ wikileaks/twitter court order. The world's media has jumped on the news that the US Department of Justice has sought, and obtained a court order seeking to compel Twitter to reveal account information associated with several of its users who are associated with Wikileaks.
Communications privacy law is exceedingly complex, and unfortunately, none of the legal experts who actually specialize in this area (people like Orin Kerr, Paul Ohm, Jennifer Granick and Kevin Bankston) have yet to chime in with their thoughts. As such, many commentators and journalists are completely botching their analysis of this interesting event. While I'm not a lawyer, the topic of government requests to Internet companies is the focus of my dissertation, so I'm going to try to provide a bit of useful analysis. However, as always, I'm not a lawyer, so take this with a grain of salt. A quick introduction to the law The order to twitter It is the second part of the order that is more interesting. Reading between the lines 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Subpoena(not?)