Here’s an idea that occurred to me as I accidentally clicked a retweeted and shortened link on twitter this morning. The thing is, the link opened the target address in a frame (think Google image search) with a rather obnoxious self-advertising header. Eeeeeew!

Needless to say, I was rather put off by the whole experience. There are several services doing this and quite some people using them. To protect the names of the guilty I’ll not name the services or the tweep perps.

However, it got me thinking; What if an Amazon Affiliate-like approach would be implemented to an url shortening service like the one mentioned above? You’d sign up to the url shortening service and you’d get ‘rewarded’ for retweeting urls shortened by the service – or rather for spewing advertisement.

I’ve tried to illustrate it in glorious monochrome below, using Balsamiq Mockups and about 29 seconds.

Technically, the url could contain a hash – or whatever – containing User ID, Original URL, AD served, etc, etc, etc.

I’d like to add that personally, I don’t think such a service would survive. That is to say, I like to think that it can’t. However, such an evil scheme may already exist.

Do you know of any such services? If not, you read it here first and I want my blood money! ;)

Update (04.05.2009):

It seems like adf.ly has implemented something along these lines now. Hey! What about my cut?!