Pity the creative team: telling the world how great your client’s product is in no more than 140 characters is no small feat. That’s right. Fresh details of the Twitter advertising platform are starting to emerge and it looks like the same terse formula Tweeters have had to master will be applied to the brands, big and small, that will look to plug their products and services to the network of 75 million.

What will it look like? It’s being described by The Wall Street Journal‘s “All Things D” blog as a knock-off of Google ads.

First, the good (well, “promising”) news:

• the ads will appear in Twitter search results; in other words, they’ll be targeted and theoretically not too obtrusive to Tweeters.
• the ads will operate off Twitter’s API so you’d imagine over time developers will be able to construct some kind of ad-tracking techniques akin to Google Adwords and Google Analytics.
• Twitter will introduce the platform first to advertising agencies so we may see some big brands among the first guinea pigs.

Now, the questions:

• Twitter’s search indexing capability is notoriously flaky. Will this mean we get to see more than 10 days’ worth of search results on a consistent basis?
• Real-time search is a tricky area for big brands to master. A targeted ad by, say, “Burger King” could easily appear just above or alongside a wave of critical tweets about service, quality, etc. Can brands maintain a balanced conversation in the Twitterverse so as not to sink their targeted ad messages? And will rivals be tempted to sink a Twitter ad campaign with some well-timed Tweets?
• The last one is practical. When will the new platform be out? The WSJ suggests Twitter won’t rush it; others say a Twitter ad platform is “imminent”.