Twitter Goes Political: Political Ads Now On Social Media

Sometime soon in a political campaign, we won't be hearing about the attack dogs. We'll just whip out our smart phones and witness the attack tweets.

Twitter, Inc. began accepting political advertisements on its hugely popular social media Web site beginning Wednesday, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. The first examples -- promoted Tweets, promoted Accounts, and promoted Trends -- were from Mitt Romney, whose account asked Twitter users to check out obamaisntworking.com, a Web site dedicated to -- well, duh.

The scheme is still in a pilot phase, according to Twitter, which said that the company is building its political sales team. But with over a year before the 2012 presidential election, there's certain to be much fodder for the Twittersphere, as well as political contributions to be steered towards Twitter's bank accounts.