Twitter developers beware. TweetUp, which has been hailed as the “Adsense for Twitter,” was announced today at TechCrunch’s Disrupt event. TweetUp is an ad platform that would give its advertisers access to analytics, an algorithm designed to rank keyword searches in a promotions-friendly manner, and, most tantalizing, a 50/50 revenue split. Basically, individuals and businesses could pay to promote their tweets to the top of any search with a relevant keyword in it, chronological order be damned.

But on the same day as the TweetUp announcement came today’s post on the Twitter blog, wherein Dick Costolo, Twitter COO, plays the part of the valiant knight defending Twitter’s integrity against those pesky third parties. In said post, he writes, “aside from Promoted Tweets, we will not allow any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API.”

This all comes shortly after the announcement of Promoted Tweets – tweets paid for by advertisers including Best Buy, Red Bull, and Starbucks that show up at the top of searches. Everyone wants to make money off Twitter. Even Twitter! But now, apparently, only Twitter actually can.

If you spend much time on the internet, you’ve probably seen them. The ads for the free-t0-play strategy MMO Evony that, instead of featuring, you know, gameplay or review quotes, feature boobs. And more boobs. I know I’m not the only one who first assumed that it was some kind of fantasy themed sex game, porn site, or social network.

Well, Evony has apparently volunteered to clean up its own act. In a statement to Gamasutra, they said:

Moving forward – based on community feedback as well as an in-depth look at advertising effectiveness – we are employing an ad campaign that focuses on the gameplay and features of Evony: Age II.

Read on...

We’ve heard of funny 404 error page Easter Eggs before, but … sponsored 404 pages? Strange. Apparently, that is the direction that Digg is headed, with an ad for Burger King set to appear on the error page that users hit when they type in a query with no results, BrandFreak reports. The ads, which were briefly up last week, are slated to reappear within the week. (The above picture is not an actual ad, but rather an artist’s rend.) The ads will be promoting Burger King’s “Tiny Hands” campaign, about a man with freakishly tiny hands who is sad because he cannot grasp a Burger King® Double Cheeseburger.

WalletPop grabbed the text of one such ad, which will be accompanied by a hypertext link to a “Tiny Hands” BK ad:

The error page is reported to say, “No results for ‘Your Search Error’ were found. Looks like your search had a typo. Blame it on your tiny hands. The beefy $1 Burger King Double Cheeseburger gives tiny hands some trouble, too.”

We’re conflicted:

There may be a “99.9 per cent” chance that Google is going to shut down its Chinese engine Google.cn, as we learned this weekend, and that presents its advertising partners with a tricky choice: Stick with the company with whom they’ve enjoyed past success and risk bannination in the Chinese market, or defect to Chinese search engines at the cost of familiarity — and freedom from censorship.

Now, according to the New York Times, the Chinese authorities have put their thumbs on the scale: They’ve warned Google’s partners that to play ball in China, they’re going to need to censor their search results, with or without Google.

The Future of Privacy Forum, an advertising trade group, has come up with an answer to those that have been calling for regulation of targeted online advertising: a lowercase “i,” curled up in its own tail, in the manner of another familiar Internet related punctuation mark. The graphic is projected to be in use by the end of this summer.

Both Congress and the FTC have expressed concerns about the level of secrecy or obfuscation surrounding target online advertising tactics, where the user’s browser history and “demographic profile” are used to generate a more personally targeted add. Advertisers are understandably worried that regulatory legislation would not move as fast as technological changes, and you know what that means: focus groups!