Twitter wants to find out what else its users are doing on their smartphones for the purpose of providing users "a more personal Twitter experience."
The microblogging platform is rolling out a new feature called app graph, which extracts information about what apps are installed on their mobile phones. In a blog post, Twitter says it wants to learn more about what apps the user has on his smartphone so it can make better decisions as to what sort of relevant information to show users.
"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," says the Twitter blog post.
The content that Twitter refers to, of course, are the advertisements on which the company builds its revenue. Like Google and Facebook, Twitter allows people to use its services for free in exchange for sending them targeted advertisements.
While Twitter already collects user information based on what is posted on their Twitter profile, Twitter does not have the same extensive database of user information collected by Google, which freely passes on the user's information from one of its numerous services to the other, and Facebook, which even has access to a user's browser history.
Twitter says the move will also help it provide more interesting tweets and "who to follow" suggestions for users. Earlier this year, Twitter began showing users relevant tweets from other people they don't follow in an attempt to bring up engagement levels and increase the length of time spent by users on the platform.
Twitter, unlike Facebook, is struggling with slowing growth and is exerting all efforts to attract new users to its platform while keeping its current users staying on longer. In the last quarter, Twitter's monthly user base grew by 23 percent to 284 million, a slight decrease from the previous quarter's 24 percent. The company is also thinking of rolling out an "instant timeline" that pulls in content from other people so that a new user will not see a blank timeline upon signing up.
However, Twitter makes it clear that the app graph will not extract information within the user's apps themselves. It will only know what apps they are using. This isn't the first time an app is able to do this. In fact, both Android and iOS allow apps that can build a list of other apps running on the smartphone.
A number of flashlight apps, for instance, have recently been found to be collecting data on what apps are currently running on a smartphone and all other sorts of information the user would rather not have the apps know.
The app graph is an opt-out feature instead of opt-in. Twitter says it will notify users once the feature is activated on their accounts. For Android users who do not want to have Twitter collect their app data, they can opt out by tapping the overflow icon (three dots stacked on top of the other), going to Settings, choosing the account and tapping Tailor Twitter based on my apps.
For iOS, users can go to the Me tab and tap the gear icon, choose their account and select Tailor Twitter based on my apps. Users with multiple Twitter accounts will have to opt out on each account separately.
