Twitter Gets In Your Face About Upgrading to Firefox 3.5

by editor on Jul.08, 2009, under TechCrunch

Woah, this is weird. Twitter has apparently starting promoting Firefox 3.5, which was released last week, to some of its users. Judging by Twitter Search, the banner began popping up around eight hours ago, and given how few people have tweeted about them it seems like they’re not being very widely distributed.

The amusing thing about the banner is that Twitter’s site may not be properly detecting which browser their visitors are currently using — Chris Saad, who tipped us off to the annoucement, says he was using Firefox 3.5 already. That said, most of the other tweets about the banner do appear to be showing up to users who aren’t using the latest version of the browser.

At this point it isn’t clear if this is a sponsored ad or more of a public service announcement. If it’s the former, it would be a significant departure from the more subtle advertising Twitter has been toying with over the last few months, which has primarily consisted of small text blurbs in the right sidebar of the site. Twitter only recently began charging for some of these ads (or at least presenting them as sponsored links), and most of them are still free promotions for apps and services in the Twitter ecosystem.

Even if this is a public service announcement, you can be sure that Twitter is closely monitoring the banner’s performance in anticipation of placing full fledged paid advertising there. They really wouldn’t be any more intrusive than the vast majority of banner ads on the web, but after years of going without any advertising at all, they’re going to take some getting used to.