Can You Make a Living from Twitter?

The more popular services like magpie and twittad become, the less followers the people who use them will have. I have been unfollowing every person who I discover to be using one of these services, and I have been encouraging others to do the same. Paid advertising tweets that are sent through without any way to identify them as advertising are unethical, and devalue reviews or recommendations which come through Twitter, as you never know if it is spam or a genuine recommendation.

I understand that Twitter, Inc. will need to eventually generate a revenue stream to support operations, and if that means Twitter will be sending paid advertising through the service, while I will be unhappy about it, at least it will be keeping the service live. But services like magpie and twittad are basically hijacking Twitter, Inc.'s bandwidth and delivery system to inject advertising into a social media network, an activity I find to be highly questionable.

I would love to see Twitter, Inc. ban the use of such services, as they effect the quality of the Twitter experience. For myself, if I wanted excessive and spammy advertising, I would be on MySpace.