Twitter’s iPhone ‘Trends’ Update Is Just The Beginning

If you’re an iPhone user who uses the official Twitter app and you recently updated you must have seen the real estate you lost to a silly trends bar that was added to the top. That bar doesn’t go away – it can’t be disabled or clicked away. And according to All Things Digital, Twitter has gone on record and the trend bar is here to stay. In fact, it’s here to grow. They intend to move the Quick Bar (as they call it) to the very top and it’s staying there. What’s it going to do up there? Serve up some ads seemingly. Currently, promoted trends are already filtering through it and the results for those trends display ads. In fact, in a few months promoted Tweets are coming as well. It may be in your timeline or in the bar itself. That’s unclear. What seems to be clear is that the Quick Bar is here to stay and Twitter is getting serious about monetizing. It’s hard to really object to this since last I recall, Twitter is running at a loss.

I have seen the new Quick Bar in action – it’s large, ugly and annoying. And I think therein lies the problem. You may get the public content with seeing ads here and there but serving them up at all times is a 180 that’s hard to adjust to.

And I suspect that this will move to all platforms and even the API. The in-timeline promoted Tweets will be coming one way or another, and I’d expect that third party Twitter apps will have to serve the same promoted trends as the official app has.