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.

It’s been interesting to see the progression of Facebook’s strategy over the past few years.

First, they began emulating Twitter with statuses and redesigned feeds, now location-based services are being integrated with the rollout of Facebook Places.

I’m curious as to whether they’re “following trends”, or simply copying everyone else. Facebook started as an easy way to keep in touch with people you know, yet they’re straying more and more from that core competency.

Foursquare and Gowalla serve very small niches, in that everyone I add or accept is there solely for the purpose of sharing location. However, when you bring the massive amounts of Facebook friends into the loop, you run into an issue of not only privacy, but also relevance.

I check in quite frequently, so my (currently nonexistent) use of Places would quickly become annoying to friends, somewhat akin to linking all Twitter posts to Facebook. Plus, I’d rather check in on Foursquare, where I can earn points, mayorships, badges, specials, and other cool schwag.

It’s also strange that the outrage surrounding this launch isn’t near as bad as the blowup a few months ago. I’d think the average user with the notion of “Facebook knows my location” would raise a lot more red flags than a few tweaks here and there. Just goes to show how much of an impact bloggers have on public perception.

The big picture

Places is taking location to the mainstream. We’re seeing the same trends repeat themselves as with the shark-jumping of Twitter. Depending on opinion, this could be seen as good or bad, but, from a somewhat selfish perspective, I think it’s more of the latter.

I remember when none of my non-tech friends were on Twitter, and to be honest, I kinda liked it that way. Twitter was my happy place. Now it’s location apps.

Oh, wait.

Do you use Facebook Places? Is the mainstream push of location good or bad?