> The FAQ on Twitter's dev site says that, "As of March 12, 2012 there is no Advertising API for serving Twitter's promoted products in third party applications." Which means the promoted tweets ought to appear in any timeline that uses the API.<p>I don't see how the conclusion that tweets ought to appear in any timeline that uses the API follows. That they don't have an API for third-party applications doesn't mean they don't have one for their own applications. In fact, I'd say that it implies the existence of an internal API for serving promoted tweets. The FAQ seems to be accurate, and not at all misleading from where I'm standing. I don't really see how this is an advertising mystery.<p>That said, the process of investigating the matter was very interesting.
The answer for this is pretty simple -- you want promoted tweets to show as promoted, and old clients don't support that type of rendering.<p>There are hundreds of twitter clients out there, many of them written once and updated sparingly. These clients and apps aren't checking for the "isPromoted" field when they get a JSON blob back from the server -- they just dump the text / author / profile pic into whatever rendering engine they have. So a promoted tweet shows up identical to a read tweet.<p>Even worse, I doubt the developers are going to waste their time adding support for promoted tweets if they don't get a cut of the ad revenue.<p>And lastly, Twitter also needs to accurately count impressions on promoted tweets. on the web they can do this with some degree of accuracy -- on clients, it's trivial to filter by the isPromoted field, resulting in delivered tweets that aren't displayed and angry advertisers.
This is simply a case of an out-of-date reference blog post (that 2010 #newtwitter article). Quick observation of Twitter.com today will reveal that it's no longer using the public API (at least from the client). It's fetching the Tweets from the server pre-rendered (via <a href="http://twitter.com/i/timeline" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.com/i/timeline</a>). So nothing to see there. Maybe taking a closer look at Twitter for iOS, which does receive promoted Tweets, would provide more information.
What's the legality with disassembling closed source apps whose code which uses a VM, effectively giving the source code? (Is ObjC similar to how C# uses .NET? ILSpy can print pretty clean output)