Its Twitter Advertising and a Great New Feature (@anywhere) for the Invited Few - not very sociable? 

The owners of the micro-blogging site, Twitter, have at last launched an advertising platformto monetise the platform:  It is called Promoted Tweets.

The social networking platform has become hugely popular worldwide over the last few years, proving an important resource for businesses, news agencies as well as ordinary users.

Twitter will begin listing paid-for promotions by websites within search results on the social networking site.

Perhaps controversially, the tweets will appear at the top of search results regardless of whether they were written earlier than other messages in a conversation or not.

Each Promoted Tweet will be clearly marked to indicate that it is an advert, according to the site's administrators.

A post on Twitter's blog stated: "We've resisted introducing a traditional web advertising model because we wanted to optimise for value before profit.

"We are launching the first phase of our Promoted Tweets platform with a handful of innovative advertising partners that include Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks and Virgin America - with more to come."

Earlier this week, Twitter also announced it had launched its new @anywhere web tool, which enables partner websites to integrate Twitter functionality into their own site experience.

The new tool is intended to allow web users to engage with existing Twitter features, through their favourite sites. 

Sources: 
Promoted Tweets - Mashable (1 and 2) and New York Times 
@anywhere - Twitter & the Guardian