"Twitter Announces Its First Commerce Product -- A 'Buy' Button On Mobile," the Tech Crunch headline reads. Twitter has just (officially) announced its newest feature: the "Buy" button, its first "commerce product." The concept is quite simple. As retailers, recording artists, and even nonprofits advertise their works through Tweets on Twitter, directing you with those key phrases "Donate Now!" and "Buy My New ... ," a new button will be displayed, allowing users to spend their money without ever leaving Twitter.
Using Stripe, a still young, but reliable payment processing system, users can store their credit card information in their Twitter accounts the first time they choose to buy something via Twitter, and never have to reenter it. They can browse Tweets the same way one can a department store online. For many people, particularly starving artists and Etsy users, this little button has the potential to significantly increase their sales. This button eliminates the extra click or two to get to the product website that users initially had to make to spend their money. As silly as it may sound, cutting out this one extra webpage or two, suddenly makes the buying process seems infinitely easier to many users. This means that users who may not have bought products in the past because they did not make the journey to the next page, or wish to use another credit card storing system, may now choose to purchase with ease.
So why is this a bad thing? Call me skeptical, or even paranoid, but all I can think of with this new little button, is "How long will this stay one little button?" Few people remember Facebook without advertisements littering the page (yes, Ad-blockers are a thing, but not everyone uses them.) Once upon a time, Facebook was much simpler, and much cleaner, than what it is now. The entire right side of the page is a stream of businesses fighting for your attention, and even the newsfeed has magically been displaying ads from pages you've never liked and websites you've never visited. Facebook games like Candy Crush Saga now allow users to "get ahead" by purchasing extra lives or other various boosters. Facebook has been cashing in on its vast ad space for quite some time. Twitter, however, has only recently started doing this.
What I've always liked about Twitter (in comparison to Facebook), was how clean and simple it always seemed to remain. You can Tweet, Retweet, and Favorite. That's about it. You can't play games. You can't poke people. You can't message people who don't want to be messaged. You have much more privacy (even if you are tweeting "OMG I feel like a kid eating my #RiceKrispies in my pink pajamas today #breakfast #snapcracklepop #goodolddays #imsosilly @ricekrispies"). Now, however, Twitter has also started utilizing its prime advertisement space. Though I consider it to be done much more tastefully than Facebook, the fact remains that this platform has also started to follow the trend of all the other major websites and sell out.
My question with this new button is simple: What's next? Will random users start to flood my Feed? Will there be miscellaneous product placements designed around who Twitter thinks I am? How much is enough? Perhaps I'm overreacting, but I the fact is that I do not want these constant flows of advertisements. Does anyone?
Youtube is probably the biggest culprit now of ads, and even Gmail tries to sneak a few in. Even if we step away from Online technologies for a moment, has anyone else noticed that movie theaters have started playing television commercials before they show their film trailers? It is no secret that the media practically shoves information down our throats now, but a lot of that information is actually wanted by the masses: Celebrity Gossip, Latest and Greatest Diet Secrets with Magic Pills, etc, etc. I have not, however, heard demand from people for these advertisements. Perhaps it is just among my college peers, but the general consensus seems to be annoyance. So why are we still being bombarded with them, and how do we make them end? Will Twitter fall down this hole to join the other platforms like Facebook and Youtube? Will this always be the case, or will a site ever stay true to it's original design? And ultimately...how can we, the consumers, stop consuming? Unfortunately, I don't have these answers. I do know that there are still platforms out there who lack the commerce clutter and I commend them for it thus far. Thanks for keeping it real Instagram, it's up to you now.
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