Earlier today, Darren Rowse posted what I would assume is a great April fools joke. No he’s not wrong with the date, he’s simply hours ahead of us over in Australia. While I seriously doubt that they were able to get a follower base of 250,000, this brings up an excellent point and is something that I would expect to see launch very soon.

Tweets can drive a significant number of visitors to your site. I know that I get a significant number of visitors from Twitter, especially when a user with a large number of followers tweets about a post of mine. Very soon we will see pay-per-tweet offerings even if Darren Rowse is the person to come up with the program. This is a duplication of PayPerPost but for the microblogging world. So the question then arises if such a system would be ethical or if this would be frowned upon by other Twitter users.

Personally, I don’t think it’s the best idea. Posting advertisements into the stream of tweets could significantly clutter your feed depending on what percentage of your friends decide to accept pay-per-tweets. Additionally, such a system would reduce the value of overall links on Twitter. While the system doesn’t yet exist and I’m calling b.s. on Darren Rowse’s post, I think somebody will try this out and the question is what will be the response when that happens?