How Twitter Learned to Love Advertising

In anticipation of The Mashies, Mashable is running a weekly series celebrating some advertising "firsts." Watch for new installments in the series every week.

More than four years passed between the time Jack Dorsey composed the first-ever tweet ("Just setting up my twtter") and Twitter started running ads in 2010

Like Facebook before it, Twitter started out somewhat ambivalent about advertising, as did its fans. In a prescient post one month before the microblogging network caught mainstream attention at the 2007 South by Southwest, Dave Armano, managing director of Edelman Digital in Chicago, fretted that advertisers could "swoop in and taint a very grassroots movement." Read more...