Twitter made a small but crucial addition to the settings menu: You can now add your birthday! Previously, Twitter users used to celebrate one’s birthday by mentioning them if you know them personally or if you saw people wishing him/her a happy birthday. From the new update there will be a link that will inform people it is your birthday, where if one clicks, they’ll see balloons floating around your Twitter profile. You can easily view this change by checking out Kevin Hart’s profile, well while it lasts.
Adding your birthday date to your Twitter profile is easy: Click the Edit profile on your profile on twitter.com and set your birthday from the drop down menus. A nice addition are the privacy settings where you can set your birthday date to be seen by either everyone, your followers, people you follow, people you follow each other or only you.
One may wonder why Twitter has taken long to add this feature on the site. Facebook had this feature from day one and it has been the place where people got to know your birthday & send happy wishes to your profile. In Twitter’s case however, it seems to be a strategic move at the back-end although it looks all flamboyant at the front end with the case of the floating balloons graphic.
Recently Twitter updated its Audience Insights which is Twitter’s behind the scenes platform that helps advertisers get more information about the users on the microblogging platform. They added tools like conversion trackers, curated insights of the audience & Twitter personas which are all geared to help advertisers create targeted ads for specific audiences. This “harmless” addition of letting people add their birthdays is all about obtaining information so as to develop an age demographic which will be used to feed advertisers for better ad targeting, not rocket science really.
The company has not indicated if the feature will be available on their official mobile apps, but it won’t be a surprise if they are updated soon.
