Many have written about in-tweet (also called in-stream) advertising. Just in the past few days, among many posts on this topic, Mark Suster asks whether it’s a good idea to have ads in tweets and concludes that it is (Mark is an investor in Ad.ly – one of the companies making possible in-tweet ads). Robert Scoble is not a fan of in-tweet advertising but points out that “people who produce content should be able to make a living for producing that content.” Nick Halstead, CEO of tweetmeme, argues that companies should leverage re-tweets for in-stream advertising. Seth Simonds asks whether he is worth money to his followers/reader. The discussion has even moved into the mainstream media – The New York Times cautions that A Friend’s Tweet Could Be an Ad.

The discussions around in-stream advertising are intellectually interesting. However, they obfuscate a bigger problem: in-stream advertising can (and I believe, will) destroy Twitter.

Here’s why: imagine if Google allowed paid search listings within organic search results. Sure, paid listings could be clearly marked as paid. Why has Google not done so? Because including paid listings within organic search results would compromise search.

What if Google allowed another type of transaction: imagine if Google allowed pages that attained a high PR value to sell the title or description meta tags (or both) to a third party for advertising purposes. If this was done, search results would be far less meaningful.

In each of the above examples, there is a predictable outcome. People would search less often. Fewer people would click on adwords ads. And Google’s core business model would suffer.

The impact of in-stream ads is further complicated by the recent search deals that Twitter signed with Google and Bing. Both search engines are now indexing tweets and the organic search results will contain sponsored tweets – the equivalent of having paid search listings within organic search results. This is a disaster waiting to happen – it’s precisely what Google has worked hard, for ten years, to avoid.

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