Twitter experiments: Ads based on users' preferences

MANILA, Philippines - Microblogging company Twitter will introduce a new advertising scheme on its popular site meant to show ads based on each users' preferences, the company said in an e-mail newsletter Wednesday.

"We're set to experiment with a way to make ads on Twitter more useful to our users," Twitter said, adding that the new ad system will first be launched in the United States.

Promoted content will soon begin to be displayed in users' accounts based on information called cookies gathered from their Internet browsers.

Facebook, in comparison, tailors ads according to the users' profiles such as age, location and interests and relying less on cookies.

Twitter also assured users that it will not track the users' browser data against their will and said that they would be allowed to change thesettings on their accounts.

"Because Twitter supports Do Not Track (DNT), Twitter will not receive browser-related information from our ad partners for tailoring ads if you have DNT enabled in your browser," the e-mail message said, referring to a privacy preference which users can define.

The company recently released Vine for Android. The application enables mobile phone users to create brief, looping videos which are said to be the visual counterpart of the 140-character Twitter post limit.