The marketing industry has done a pretty good job at adopting the power of the Internet to better reach their audience. Social media’s become a huge buzzword in the space, and these first two sentences could probably pass as a rearranged garbling of some Mashable or TechCrunch post.

But market research is an entirely different story. Everyone’s pretty set in their ways when it comes to traditional surveys and focus groups. Brands are leveraging their fans online to figure out how to sell better, but not to figure out how to develop better products. Why conduct surveys from a totally random group of people when you could be doing it from the people that are actually going to convert to customers?

The Layer team and myself already have built a forced ranking app off of Rank ‘em to handle the actual surveys, but the next step is automating targeting on Facebook and beyond. I pitched Layer as decision-support software at Startup Riot, but after a good bit of feedback, we think market research is a vertical with a lot more potential.

So that’s what I’ve been working on. And things are just getting good.

In a recent announcement and in an update to their terms of service, Twitter is now saying that they should be the sole developer of clients, justifying the decision with a claim that everyone should access Twitter with the same experience.

Say what?

I’ve been a huge fan and compulsive user of third-party access points for years. Different people have vastly different needs, and trying to enforce a “one size fits all” policy just won’t work. Now that these clients have huge loyalties and userbases, choosing this time to bring down the iron fist makes little to no sense. If the strategy from the beginning was to only offer one way to access the platform, fine. That makes sense. Users would adopt Twitter with that mentality, grow with that mentality, no problem. But don’t tease us with the sweet, sweet water of clients and then threaten to take them away. Granted, existing clients will likely remain, but I’m worried Twitter won’t hit its potential without new developers contributing to the ecosystem.

Because some of Twitter’s best features (retweets, hashtags, etc.) have come from crowdsourced adoption and development. It was only after third-party implementations that Twitter built these features into their site. Why stifle innovation by bringing things down to one point of access? Clients should be praised as a way to bring even more eyes onto Twitter, not condemned for “confusing users”.

There’s also a strange bit of irony in the sense that Twitter’s official iOS and OS X app originated from and was acquired from an individual developer.

Give me TweetDeck or give me death! Okay, maybe that was a slight stretch.

Chrome on Google TV

The concept of Google TV‘s been around for a while, but has recently taken a hard form in the Logitech Revue and Sony Internet TV series. I got a chance to play around with an installation today at the Sony Style store and, despite what I consider to be an above-average user interface, still don’t see the appeal.

I’m an HTPC man; I live and breathe my hackintoshed machine running Boxee. When connecting a computer to a TV, you free yourself from limitations. Any software can be installed, upgrades can be made, and you could even dual-boot if desired. The price difference between Google TV hardware compared to a $699 Mac Mini (or much less expensive self-built machine) doesn’t seem large enough. That’s the one thing that Apple got right about the new Apple TV; $99 is a wide enough gap from any computer.

However, I often have to take a step back from my power user-esque preferences and realize that the average consumer is actually paying for limitation. They see it as convenience, but it’s really the trading of control for simplicity.

Google TV isn’t for me. But for people who want to be ahead of the curve while still keeping it simple, go for it.

Will you be getting a Google TV device? Thoughts?