Twitter Tweeting Deals (Ads) @earlybird

Twitter is following Dell's lead by offering special deals via a new @earlybird account.  Followers of @earlybird will receive tweets or text messages with special deals from Twitter's "partners" - aka advertisers.

According to Twitter's Help Center, @earlybird was created because:

Many of you use Twitter to stay on top of timely, relevant information, and lots of businesses are already sharing special offers on Twitter. We believe that surfacing deals through the @earlybird account will help you discover the best of those deals, as well as find and follow accounts that consistently provide exceptional value.

Although I think the suggestion made by ReadWriteWeb is far more accurate.  Twitter has been trying out a number of new ways to generate revenue for a company that so far hasn't been nearly as exciting for investors as tweeters.  These efforts have included the Google-esque "Promoted Tweets" and "Promoted Trends" as well as enhanced pages for corporations and making their tweets available to search engines and other sites.

This latest effort to cash in on the site's massive userbase is actually borrowed from Dell's playbook.  In December, Dell reported $6.5 million in sales via their Twitter experiment over the past two years.  Twitter wants a cut of this success and provide these partners with even more exposure.

All in all - it could be a win-win or an annoying string of ads in your timeline.  At least these are ads you can "unfollow" if you so desire.  What do you think?  Will this idea be a huge hit with big rewards for Twitter's revenue or fizzle out as ads people actually don't want to follow?  While you ponder that - head over to our Twitter account and click that fun "follow" button.