This is not the first time this week that individuals have seen their social media-related identities hijacked for advertising purposes. Crunchgear recently reported a slew of tweets linking to phishing sites. Essentially a bot account has been pushing out fake retweets from celebrities in the hopes that loyal fans will see the RT@aplusk's and RT@oprah's and make the mistake of clicking through.

While on the one hand it's incredibly flattering that your endorsement of a product might actually influence others' beliefs and attitudes. It's probably best to monitor your identities to ensure that your good reputation remains in tact. And if you don't mind endorsing products in your profiles, you might as well get paid for it through a service like Magpie or Izea.

UPDATE: After publishing this article, we received a note from Facebook representative Annie Ta saying, "Basically, any ads you currently see doing this are coming from third-party ad networks and are only running within the canvas page of an application, which is controlled by third party developers rather than Facebook. We constantly review our policies to ensure that these third-party ads meet the expectations we have for user experience."

As much as those bloggers who receive these gifts would like to claim this isn't the case, freebies like free laptops, trips, or gift cards are likely to influence a writer's opinion of a product. We just heard from a food blogger last week who told us that she regularly receives expensive spices, books, and mail-order steaks from companies that won't to be covered on her blog.

Do We Want the FTC to Regulate the Blogosphere?

At the same time, though, we do feel queasy about the FTC starting to extend its reach to the blogosphere. While we dislike the idea of not disclosing these gifts, we're not sure having the government intervene here is such a great idea, either. We also can't help to wonder how the FTC is going to monitor the thousands of small-time bloggers who regularly receive freebies. The FTC also won't be able to do much about the large number of these blogs that are based outside of the United States.

Now those critics will have something else to get up-in-arms about: Izea is planning a launch of a new ad platform called "Sponsored Tweets." And just like it sounds, this new spinoff will pay people to tweet.

Murphy believes the community will be self-policing and the sponsored messages won't get out-of-hand since too many paid tweets could easily alienate a Twitter user's followers. And because some campaigns will pay based on the number of clicks a link receives, that's not something the pay-per-tweet participants would want to risk. (Other campaigns will pay a flat rate per tweet).

Izea isn't the only company using Twitter as an ad platform - the pay-per-tweet service Magpie has also been running campaigns for some time. However, on Magpie the companies whose sponsored messages were being tweeted out weren't necessarily the ones buying the ads - it was outside affiliates. Of course, that only came to light after we revealed some of the participating company names in a blog post back in April. Still, the set up there is arguably much more spammy than with Izea who plans to work directly with advertisers.

The only question now is how big will the backlash be this time around? Is this a better or worse idea than paid blog posts? Will you immediately unfollow anyone whose posted a tweet tagged #spon? Or only if they go overboard? Share your thoughts in the comments.