When Twitter dropped the hammer this week on third-party services that place ads into users' "tweet streams," you'd think it would have come as terrible news to those very services, right? Not so! In fact, four such companies have already insisted their futures remain bright. Their hopes hinge on Twitter's definition of "inject[ing] paid tweets into a timeline," which seems to allow paid tweets as long as they aren't dropped in automatically through the Twitter API. Izea CEO Ted Murphy quickly noted that his Sponsored Tweets service only had to deactivate a "direct publishing" option. Participants will just manually post ad content. But surely the crackdown puts a hurt on TweetUp, a new tool meant to boost the search presence of sponsored Twitterers? They're safe too, according to the startup's COO, Jon Kraft. "The vast, vast majority of our plans really are not going to be affected by the terms of service changes," he says. Sure, fine, whatever. Let's go right to the folks at ground zero: Ad.ly and 140Proof, both of which flat-out offer "in-stream advertising." But they're also just fine, thank you very much, according to upbeat blog posts titled "Business as Usual" and "Working with Twitter." I suppose I shouldn't expect these companies to ring their own death knell, but come on, these ultra-sunny forecasts just come off sounding ridiculous.

—Posted by David Griner