Games: Another reason why Twitter needs filters

May 29, 2009 | Eric Eldon | Comments | |

There’s a game on Twitter right now called Spymaster — I’m not exactly sure what it is because I haven’t joined. I just know about it because a lot of people I follow on Twitter are playing it, and one gets the impression that any action they take in the game (”assassinating” each other or whatnot), gets tweeted back into their followers. Apparently, there are settings in the game to limit the tweetspam, but nobody seems to be doing that.

Maybe they should rename this game to SpamMaster.

It reminds me, and some other people, of the early days of Facebook platform, around two years ago. Then, application developers gained users — and pissed them off — by sending out automated messages from the application to friends’ news feeds. Facebook responded, eventually, by altering its algorithm to mostly stop these app notifications from appearing.

In its latest redesign, though, Facebook has dropped its news feed algorithm in favor of letting users manually decide what they want to filter, whether application notifications or anything else. This is more like how lifestreaming service FriendFeed has worked for awhile — you decide who to follow on the service, and you can decide what sort of things those people share that you want to see in your feed.

Twitter needs some sort of solution along these lines — after all, it wants to be a platform company for social games like Spymaster, right? But doing that is going to be tricky. How does Twitter decide what to filter automatically? Anything? Maybe create a filter for third-party applications, that appears on the right-hand menu column on the Twitter homepage interface (that’s what FriendFeed’s interface already looks like, for what it’s worth). Maybe Twitter could use Facebook Connect and other social data-sharing services to filter friends by service? So you could see a Twitter for just your Facebook friends, for example. Maybe filtering using hashtags (Twitter’s user-created filtering mechanism) about particular topics, as some have suggested?

In the meantime, lots of Twitter users are being spammed, and it’s annoying.

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About the Author, Eric Eldon

Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.

  • I'm with you on this one Eric...but damn is Spymaster addictive....
  • Michael
    Or...OR, and bear with me here, you could just unfollow the super-annoying people you follow.
  • you know, i've wanted for months to throw sheep inside twitter but text-based sheep doesnt do it for me. i want the actual image and that would mean for twitter to get a radical redesign. hence, you'll never see me play spymaster or text-based superpokes. doesnt make sense :P
  • Spymaster tweets are annoying for anyone not playing the game. So are the hashtag convos for things like #threewordsduringsex, and magpie, and tweetergetter, and all the other useless non-content. Anyone filling my stream with such junk gets unfollowed. That's the beauty of twitter - it's totally opt-in, and therefore, opt-out.
  • i wish more twitter clients had keyword-based filtering/blacklisting.

    http://filttr.com/ is a good web-based twitter client that can filter by keyword as well as set priorities on the people you follow.
  • What we could really use is a karma-based system, so that people could collaboratively filter others' posts, such as "OMG!!! Like these cupcakes are terrific!!!" which to my mind is just as bad if not worse than Spymaster...