Yesterday, Twitter appeared to switch something off, and something else on. The thing they turned off was a really easy way to embed a Twitter timeline into a web page, and that method allowed you to style that data using CSS. It stopped working.

In its place are Widgets - you create them on Twitter’s web site, and paste a bit of code into your web page. Hey presto - your timeline is back. But there are some bad points. Firstly, you can’t style it using CSS any more. That is because the timeline is not part of your web page - it’s contained within an iFrame. This means that Twitter has control over the loo and feel of the stream, and it introduces a few extra goodies like a way to post onto the Timeline from within that web page. Some may like that, others won’t. It is well known now that Twitter wants timelines to be represented uniformly - and is insisting to App developers that if they want to continue to have (limited) access to Twitter data, they have to present it according to their wishes. Clearly, the iFrame is in place to enforce that.

And then I got thinking a bit more - it would be possible, using CSS, to obfuscate sponsored Tweets. Twitter won’t want that either. Hence the iFrame.

Then, when looking at the Widget set up, I noticed a check-box labelled “Opt out of tailoring Twitter”. Hmm - that’s interesting., I thought. I clicked on the little ? next to this. I get this page:
https://support.twitter.com/articles/20169421

This paragraph tells me something interesting:


In essence, Twitter is starting to gather behavioural data about you, and it needs to use cookies to track this, and, of course, the iFrame links to their domain so they know who you are and where you are. This is the same as other social sites - Google+ and Facebook Like buttons are similarly contained in iFrames for much the same reason.

So, just be warned about this, and if you use Twitter, check your profile and switch the tracking features off and log out of Twitter in your browser just to be sure.

Can't see anything in settings about tracking

Where is this in my profile settings?
Logging out of Twitter in my browser is not really an option for me as I don't use any sort of Mac client, I only use Twitter in the browser, so turning off this feature would be handy for me.

Mark

I'm starting to get a bit bored with both FB and Twitter. FB more than Twitter at the moment, but both seem to be filling up with just too many people. I remember the good old days, when both were niche!

Just because Fb has a billion users … you don't have to interact with them all! (8+D

Mark

I got fed up with FB being popular that I created my own alternative. I'm the only person on it, so I never get bugged by random pokes now.

Regarding Twitter, I read an intersting and rather sweary blog post from a developer recently about how crap and restrictive their APIs are. His solution was to run a server logged in with a dummy account and scrape the data he was after.

The APIs seem to have been thrown up into the air, scraped off the floor, and then smushed back together again in an attempt to try and make a product that's more able to generate income. Bits have been removed, bits have been slightly mangled, and nobody seems to care about devs being able to continue to do interesting things with the data so people want to use the service.

For those who want to know - and I found this yesterday when I was trying to find out why Twitter had failed and what replacements (if any) were available.

Go here:
https://twitter.com/settings/widgets/
Create a new Widget

In there you will find the Opt Out check box.

Now, this page: https://support.twitter.com/articles/20169421 says the following:

Right now, it’s greyed out telling me that it’s not available to me yet. It’s under Account in Settings beneath Tweet Privacy. I don’t know why this one is greyed out, but the option in the Widget builder is available.

It also says:

Gathering behavioural data is the reason why I stopped using FB and never signed up for Twitter. Agree that FB was great when it was just about people who had gone to uni so any kid and their pet guinea pig couldn't sign up. Meant there was lots more hotty totty for my mate to perve (he had a habit of checking out girls' photos/accounts and then periodically checking his abs by lifting up his shirt).

I got this:

Personalization The feature to tailor Twitter based on your recent website visits is not available to you.

I think they are testing it before making it available to everyone.