I'll Buy My Own Balloons

<p><em>Twitter like Facebook is cozying up to you on your birthday as it wants to serve you ads and make some money</em><br><br>As if it weren’t enough that you have a few hundred soppy birthday greetings to deal with on Facebook, you can now add many thousands to that. If your Twitter followers really love you, that is. If they don’t, not to worry, as Twitter will plant a few animated balloons on your profile, presumably making you feel all warm and fuzzy and loved all over. You can spend your special day saying thank you to everyone you don’t know, because what other way is there to celebrate, really.<br><br>The reason Twitter wants to be so up-close and personal is much the same as Facebook’s – it wants to serve you ads and make some money. And well, it has to, else why would it stick around spending millions on supporting the world’s ‘stream of consciousness.’<br><br>Both on Facebook and on Twitter, you can choose to let friends, relatives, followers and enemies see your date of birth in all its glory, or keep it hidden and have a more peaceful day. You can choose not to add it in the first place. But once it’s given, the network won’t care whether your friends know or now – as long as it does and its advertisers do. To show you ads of a Harley Davidson and not beauty soap, you’ll have to let the social network know something about you and a birthday is critical to direct age-specific messages at you.<br><br>While Facebook has been ruling the online and mobile advertising roost, the same cannot be said of Twitter, whose CEO Dick Costolo recently stepped down after getting outright tired of investor criticism and a race for numbers. Twitter just doesn’t have enough active users, say stakeholders, and advertising dollars will only come in if the involved user base is proven to be substantial and growing rapidly. You wouldn’t think it from the noise that’s made on Twitter, but it’s actually got less users now than the photo sharing network Instagram does and has been overtaken by it in valuation.<br><br>But always be wary of the word personalise in technology and social media. It means not only that you will be shown ads, which you may believe to be a small price to pay for a free service, but that your experience will be shaped and led towards further realisation. This, in a subtle way, reduces your choices while appearing to customise your experience making what the algorithm thinks you wanted, phenomenon you can already see with Google.<br><br>At the same time, with today’s on-demand economy growing the way it is, you may wish Twitter well and be perfectly happy with the ads and the buy buttons. For now though, I’ll buy my own balloons.</p>