Twitter’s ads would work a lot better if they knew what age group they should be targeting for your profile. Well soon you will be able to go to twitter.com and set your date of birth on your profile. That way you get to see balloons floating up your profile page on your birthday and Twitter will know what age group you are in for targeting different ads and content.

Twitter has a minimal sign up process which makes it easy to sign up for an account because all they ask for is your name, username, email or phone number. The registration lacks basic information such as age, gender and other demographics. This means that it is difficult to target ads because they don’t know which accounts should be targeted with certain ads.

I’m betting that soon Twitter will be alerting people you interact with the most about your birthday so that they can send “Happy Birthday” tweets in much the same way that Facebook does. Who doesn’t like people pouring over your profile wishing you a happy birthday?? (raises hand tentatively)

Back in 2010 Facebook pushed biographical info to the top of everyones profile which encouraged people to fill it in, keep it current and ultimately lead to the rise of the ad targeted engine that they have today. Twitter now needs to play catch up yet again and find ways of encouraging users to fill out new biographical data so that they can come up with their own ad targeted system.

It doesn’t bother me so much in the sense that I know I can’t get away from the ads so I would prefer to see ads relevant to me. The approach feels a bit weird though, if you want certain data about me just ask. Send a prompt to fill out some new fields such as hometown, date of birth, education or whatever the hell else you want to know.

At least doing it the straight forward way would mean that it doesn’t feel like me filling Twitter’s data bank in exchange for floating balloons.