Twitter's Promoted Accounts are live: What does this mean?

Recently, we wrote about Twitter being on the verge of releasing a new feature called 'Promoted Accounts', and as of a few hours ago it's officially live! Looks like Twitter HQ is all hands on deck today, with the announcement of a new CEO and the launching of a new functionality.Twitter's 'Promoted Accounts' are a paid counterpart of its current 'Who to follow' feature, and it works by selecting Promoted Accounts to appear on your profile based on your interests. It was exactly a week ago that this feature was announced by then-COO Dick Costolo at iAB MIXX conference in New York City. By the looks of the product it's similar to their existing Promoted Trends feature, whereby the promoted brand is listed first followed by other regular accounts. So far, it hasn't felt intrusive or 'in your face' because if you don't like the promoted account you can simply click "X" to remove it.Twitter have also announced they are releasing an update to their API (Application Programming Interface) which means we may soon be seeing promoted tweets and promoted trends on third party apps. According to Twitter's official blog, they are currently beta testing this with popular app Hoosuite.Updating their API is a smart move by Twitter, as many have been saying that in order for site updates to be truly useful, they must be integrated with third-party applications. This also gives brands who are using Promoted Accounts and Promoted Trends as a marketing tool more bang for their buck, and we might even finally see Twitter start to turn profitable.[Image Credit: Twitter & Hootsuite]