How much are your tweets worth?

So it's almost the end of January and your wallet has taken an absolute beating for nearly two months straight. The good news is that if you're a Twitter junkie then you might actually have the chance of making some easy money.

The idea is very simple, and you may have even figured it out already — if you want some quick cash and you've got something of a following on Twitter, you can earn that bit on the side by signing up to Ad.ly, a new web service that publishes one ad a day through your Twitter feed.

We know what you're thinking already, and no, if you sign up you won't be pushing out ads for erectile function boosting nasal spray or bedroom enhancers of any other type. This thing is legit, the fact that Stephen Colbert is on Ad.ly's publishers list was enough to convince us of that, despite the presence of some less reputable names.

You by no means need as many followers as either of those two have, and strangely enough you can name your price, although there's no guarantee you'll get it.

After so many of us spent 2009 trying to figure out what the deal with Twitter is, and what makes it so different from Facebook and some other social networks, we may have found the answer. It seems perfectly reasonable that a clutch of heavily followed celebrity and pseudo-celebrity tweeters, along with various other uber-tweeters might want to pull in those extra dollars by sending out a bit of spam from their accounts each day. It doesn't seem out of hand to think that anyone who uses Twitter might want to do this as well, but can you imagine sending out ads through your Facebook account? N.O. W.A.Y.

So what does that mean? Aside from the obvious fact that you don't — we hope — want to flood your friends' news feeds with ads. We've got our theories about it but we want to hear yours: What are the big differences between Twitter and Facebook?