 "Twitter introduces 'tailored ads', bans auto and mass following")
Twitter has announced that it will soon be rolling out a new experiment, thanks to which users will be seeing advertisements based on the websites they’ve previously visited. Called “tailored ads”, Twitter will be showing you ads using cookies. This will be rolled out to users in the US currently.
Advertisers will be able to upload browser cookie IDs or email databases to be able to show promoted tweets and accounts to Twitter users based on the interest they’ve shown in a particular brand. “Users won’t see more ads on Twitter, but they may see better ones,” wrote Kevin Weil, Senior Director of Product, Revenue for Twitter in a blog post.
Changes galore!
Say, a clothing brand would like its ads to show up on timelines of people who are have frequented its website or have signed on to its newsletter. The business will share scrambled, unreadable email addresses – a hash – or browser related information, like a browser cookie ID and Twitter will match it with the information to accounts to show those users the special discount-based “promoted” tweet.
Users will be able to opt out of this tracking since Twitter is an avid supporter of Do Not Track. The browser option lets certain websites know it is not okay to track information. You can simply uncheck the box next to “Promoted Content” next to your account settings and let Twitter know that you do not want your account to be matched to the information shared by its ad partners.
On the other hand, Twitter has also updated its developer guidelines with some major changes, which also includes a ban on automated following and a relaxation on third party services.
The micro-blogging service will now ban third party applications from nudging users to follow their official accounts once they have logged on to the service. Twitter will also be barring developers from writing programs that mass follow accounts. Twitter has also said that third parties are no longer allowed to host “datasets of raw Tweets for download.”
However, the service is relaxing certain rules too. It will now allow languages that display from right to left to be able to contain the user’s display picture on the right. It will also now allow mixing data from the website and from out of it on third party websites as long as these blogs and sites are manually curated.
Intrigued by all things social, Nishtha will invariably tweet about you. When not tweeting or writing about the next viral video, you will hear her proclaiming her love to Metallica, James Hetfield, Opeth, Akerfeldt and all bands that go 'growl'. She also obsesses about ACP Pradyuman and South Park and you will always find her moving around with a book. Her focus is on all the happening stuff in the tech domain, and she won't hesitate to take a shot at some of the oddball devices that make their way to our labs.