I noticed late last night a post from MG Siegler regarding the new social initiative from Amazon, in which they’re adding the ability for surfers and users of the website to tweet out a product recommendation from the site, and make use of their affiliate code in the process. I was impressed that Amazon finally seemed to “get” a piece of social media, since the company ironically fuels a lot of the Web 2.0 movement but stays relatively disengaged from it as a corporate entity. Despite my initial awe, an immediate red flag went up in my mind as I scanned the program for mention of the use of disclosure in the tweets that get sent out.

Tonight, Amazon sent an email to members of Amazon Associates letting them know about a new feature: Twitter integration. Basically, when you’re logged into your Associate account, you’ll see a new “Share on Twitter” button on your Site Stripe (a management toolbar along the top of the page). As you’d expect, clicking this button will prepare a tweet complete with a shortened URL to send out of all of your Twitter followers.

Here’s why this is interesting: As Amazon clearly notes at the end of its email (copied below), you will earn referral money for anyone that clicks on these links and buys a product. Obviously, links that bring in referral fees are nothing new, this has been going on with blogs for a long time. But Twitter users do love to click on links, so this feature could actually mean some real money for popular Twitter users with a massive following. And it’s yet another way that companies — and now even Twitter’s users — are making money off of Twitter, which Twitter won’t see a dime of (presumably, anyway).

It’s smart business.  I applaud Amazon for the effort, and for one, I’m glad it’s them doing this rather than a smaller or more wishy-washy company. As we’ve noted in our past coverage of Amazon, they’re the type of company that doesn’t mind one bit throwing their weight around when it comes to challenging ridiculous US governmental regulations, as was the case in North Carolina in the Blue Nile / Amazon debacle.

In this case, nowhere is Amazon requiring their users or affiliates to disclose on Twitter, something that the FTC was very clear about being a requirement, and something they would prosecute potentially both content producers as well as the sponsoring company for.

As common sense dictates, though, doing a disclosure (proper and full or not) is almost impossible in a twitterstream, and my guess is that Amazon is fully aware of the problems presented with being guideline compliant, and is willing to go to court over this.

Could this be the future landmark case that overthrows and invalidates the new FTC guidelines for bloggers? One can only hope.