Twitter to snoop on every app on your phone - Telegraph
In a post on its help centre web page, Twitter said it would target people who use its app on all mobile devices that run Apple's iOS and Google's Android operating systems.
"To help build a more personal Twitter experience for you, we are collecting and occasionally updating the list of apps installed on your mobile device so we can deliver tailored content that you might be interested in," the company said.
The information, which Twitter calls a person's "graph data" will be used to "improve 'who to follow' suggestions that share similar interests; add tweets, accounts or other content to your timeline that we think you'll find especially interesting, and showing you more relevant promoted content".
If ONLY we'd have all taken up App.net...
There is an interesting paradox here. Most real people use Facebook. Most geeks don't (and sometimes this means they forget that most real people do) but most geeks do use Twitter.
As it moves inexorably toward the Facebook crime sheet - Will the geeks stop using it? Marco Arment thinks not.
New Twitter search API won’t be available to third-party clients – Marco.org
We’re all just one compelling feature away from leaving our third-party apps on our own. For some of us, this full-archive search will be that feature. What’s next remains to be seen — I suspect direct-message enhancements may be — but I bet third-party clients will lose half of their users within two years without Twitter ever having to explicitly kill them.
We won’t even be angry at Twitter — we’ll move to the official apps voluntarily, and we’ll look back on all third-party clients like we look back on Tweetie, vanity link shorteners, and third-party image hosts today: as relics of a quickly abandoned past before we all started using Twitter’s better, newer features. You’ll see.
Maybe Twitter will let the geeks keep their own little ghetto. It won't make any difference to the economics.