Spymaster, the Twitter-based game that we covered last night, is spreading like crazy today. It’s been a trending topic on Twitter throughout the day, even ahead of the hype around Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing. Because of this popularity though, some Twitter users are getting inundated with tweets from the service in their streams. It’s not really spam, because it’s their friends doing it, but to some, it’s very annoying. Former Digg lead architect, Joe Stump, is particularly pissed off.
“I’ve started both unfollowing and reporting users of this game to @spam. This isn’t because I hate my friends, it’s because I have no other recourse to stop this application’s abusive behavior,” he writes in a blog post today. While Stump isn’t entirely accurate that the only way to gain points is by tweeting out your actions in the game, the spirit of what he’s saying is correct because you are encouraged to tweet out your actions in the game to earn more points. He notes that this is similar to what happened with Facebook Platform early on, as games like Zombies took over people’s streams. This is something that VentureBeat’s Eric Eldon notes as well, joking that maybe they should rename the game “SpamMaster.”
But the real issue here, which both Stump and Eldon bring up, is that this is the perfect example of why Twitter needs filters of some sort. We’ve been railing on this for a while, and I’m actually quite glad this game has come along to bring the issue to the forefront. The problem isn’t that the game is spam, it’s that Twitter is not at all set up to handle games like this, even though it is positioning itself to be a robust platform.
You need to be able to do things like block certain hashtags or keywords, and to be able to group together certain friends. Currently, various third party sites/services handle thing on top of Twitter, but it’s not enough if Twitter is really going to be a new form of communication. Because if Twitter gets overrun by these types of viral games, people will simply stop visiting Twitter, and it will destroy the platform’s backbone.
Not that these are trivial things for Twitter to implement given its crazy rate of growth right now. But it will be needed if that growth is to continue in the future. At the very least, Twitter should allow you to block which apps you get updates from — though I think it still considers Spymaster updates to be coming from the “web.”
For his part, Spymaster co-founder Eston Bond says, “Backlash has been pretty minimal. Some people find Spymaster noisy but I’m amazed at how many people defend their tweeted spymaster actions to others (search can give you some examples.) For now, everyone’s having fun and I want to make sure that we can keep the game compelling in the long term. I have lots of content ideas that I’ll be hopefully implementing soon.”
Again, I don’t consider this Spymaster’s problem — but there is a problem, it’s Twitter’s. You’ll see this as more of these style games come along. It’s a matter of when, not if.
I agree completely.
My followers asked me to turn off all notifications, and I gladly did so.
That said, there never should have been this problem in the first place.
There should simply be a setting which says “do not show me tweets which contain the following words:” where people could enter “#spymaster” or “donkeyfucker” and that would be that.
Hell, I smell a revenue model here.
And it’s definitely easier to filter that than @ replies.
hey everybdy needs money
“it considers itself to be a robust platform” What???
The site crashes on me every 30 minutes. I don’t consider that robust at all…
fair enough on some levels. i updated the wording.
Exactly the same reason facebook annoys me to no end. Please don’t go that route Twitter.
Wrong. This is the best twitter news ever. Twitter being destroyed as a platform because its users persued meaningless stream content, how ironic. TC, will you ever realize that Twitter content is already 100% spam. Death to Twitter through self destruction. Perfect.
I admit I’m enjoying this game. I’ve turned off all notifications – primarily because I don’t want my followers to be bothered with posts about me trying to assassinate @arrington.
A simple filter to remove hashtags from your stream would solve this problem, and one I see as more annoying #quotes.
Or the developers could leave all notifications off by default. Of course their game wouldn’t have taken off like it did without the tweets, but they could certainly turn off a few of them by default. Maybe just send one tweet when you sign-up:
“I’m enjoying this new game # Url, etc.” or allow you to manually send the tweets when something is accomplished.
All easy solutions, on the development and twitters side – but twitter addressing the filter idea is definitely needed. I’d rather they update to address the bigger issue than the game developers.
By the way, @arrington won.
It’s more fun to assassinate @arrington in real life.
LOL JK JK
Twitter definitely needs filters and also groups!
Yeah. It’s gotten pretty bad on my stream. What’s killing me is now that I’ve received 7 DMs in the past few hours inviting me to play. That’s worse because for some people at 10 cents per message, that’s nearly a dollar that some people paid to be spammed.
DM abuse is 10x as worse because it usually generates an email or SMS message.
yeah i have gotten so many SMS/DMs the past day.
i am usually a complainer but this spamming of game results has not bugged me yet. i actually found it funny when joe stump said he removed/unfollow mg his new co-founder due to this.
I’ve been quite bothered by these tweets in my stream as well.
Why cant the game put @spymaster at the beginning of every tweet so people that don’t play the game (or aren’t following @spymaster) wont see the tweets?
The worst are people who auto-FB their Tweets. I read about 10% of my tweets, but near 90% of FB posts.
People need some device to watch their feeds and hit them over the head when they get to spammy.
I’d rather read what color every one of my 600+ facebook friends are than another tweet from this insipid game.
Joe Stump only cares because he is developing location-based games for @crashcorp and this can really hurt their potential if other social games are irresponsible and force twitter or other networks to cap the amount of “virality” that can be forced upon people’s friends or followers.
True, he is making his own games, but as far as I know they’re more real-world based and not completely based-around Twitter. After this rant, I highly doubt we’ll see Crash Corp spamming Twitter users
But all his points are right-on about Twitter filters, I think.
I didn’t say they were based around twitter.
And yes, I have complete faith that Joe and MG (the other MG, Matt Galligan) will do the right thing. Viral games become viral because they’re awesome, not because they send a lot of messages to your social networks.
Great points MG. I think these are issues that need to be addressed if Twitter is going to evolve as a versatile application platform.
In Spymaster, we’re very explicit about what messaging will be sent out, allow granular controls over that messaging, and even impose some of our own throttling on top of that.
Are the notifications defaulted to off or on?
I thought you guys might have your own throttling, as I bought a bunch of stuff all at once without realizing I had that set to tweet out — but only saw one tweet. I was pretty worried I just rapid-fired my twitter followers to death, but you guys stopped it, so nice move.
As I said yesterday, love the game, thinks the way it works is genius, but Twitter needs to be slightly reworked to handle these types of things.
Here’s a dead simple solution: start all of the SpyMaster tweets with “@spymaster”. Then only other people also following @spymaster (and presumably, therefore, playing the game) will be bothered by the game notifications.
Of course, this hurts your viral spreadability, but to me seems like the most straightforward solution to the problem. At least make it an option.
I updated my post to reflect how the game is played. My biggest gripe, really, as you point out is that I have NO other recourse within Twitter (without changing my usage/application/behavior).
The second big gripe is that the game was built, from the ground up, to promote spammy behavior. Sure, you can play the game with this stuff turned off, but it’ll be a lot harder to win at it.
Great post though, MG. You’re a welcome addition to TC.
Thanks Joe – Really glad you brought this issue up because this is just the first of many of these types of games/apps that we’re going to see (as everyone can now see how well it works to promote this way). And this is a great example of why we need filters, pronto, as you note.
You know, if you run the math on the incentive, its certainly not “a lot harder” to win w/o them. You get a 1 percent increase per item (8% max). It’s a small token we threw out there, but the variances between the different items far outweigh that.
Spymaster tip: weapons owned, and spies in your ring carry *much* more weight than anything else in the game.
Good tip, Chris. Going to kill rest of the TC office now.
I actually think the best route for Twitter would be to not do anything about this. It will take care of itself naturally. The whole point of the twitter follower system is that people will only follow you if they care what you are saying. If you start spamming they will unfollow you in a heartbeat (exactly what Joe Stump did). Folks will quickly figure this out and not use spammy apps.
Think about the alternative. If Twitter added filtering, then users could say “it’s ok if I spam you, you can just filter those messages”… and now I’m having to set up filters every friggin day for a new spammy app. No thanks.
There is a reason this works with Twitter but not facebook – Twitter is ONLY about messaging. With Facebook, I don’t want to unfriend you just because you have a spammy app, because there is a lot of other functionality I lose, so blocking is appropriate. On the other hand with Twitter, if I don’t care for what you are tweeting, there is nothing left but to unfollow you.
I agree. Spam problems always seem to work themselves out on Twitter. It is unnecessary to make things more complicated. It’s easy to unfollow people, and hopefully people don’t get offended by that.
The only true option here is to spam the hell out of Twitter. Please eveyone continue to abuse Twitter into oblivion.
Spymaster team will be at the Tweetup tonight giving away Spymaster stickers… http://www.face...eid=79804386178
Here we go, application spam now on twitter.
Soon to follow:
“Send a bluish hearts to your friends”
“Jessica just took the ‘How gay is your kitten?’ quiz and the answer was: yellow”
aaand…
“Twaffia wars”
You could block the application that sent the Tweet – in this case: from Spymaster. This would be akin to blocking an application in Facebook.
Yep, I noted that above, though it looks like Twitter has separated Spymaster as different from “web” yet.
Why are you writing about this as if this is some form of brand new pyramid game… these games are what decapitated facebook. And these games have been around since the dawn of the internet, and even before on the BBS boards.
True, it’s annoying…for the first week, if you’ve decided to be disgruntled about it and not join in… but after everyone thats playing gets bored with spamming their friends (2-5 days)… plus their spymaster account gets suspended.. I’m sure the tech geeks will get their wish and see Google Wave and Microsoft Bing be at the top again
Decapitated? Keep thinking that, and we’ll keep making 8 figure net profits at Zynga.
Anyone see Playfish revenue numbers?
How about Playdom and Slide?
The more you think Facebook Platform is dead, the more revenue for the companies building on it. Thanks.
Decapitated?…hhmm…I’m not the biggest facebook fan, but people act like its members a running for the hills.
Last I checked they were still doing pretty “well”.
twitter has an identity crisis. users dont hang out at twitter. theres nothing interesting there. it will never be a major gateway destination site. twitter is not a place users want to make or call home. i wish someone would buy them so we can move on to a startup with some meat on its bones.
FollowLocator.com – cling ons
King of clubs is off the table!
Yeah, maybe we could talk about your site and how awesome it is. You are so transparent. Don’t you get that your negative comments about EVERY SINGLE ARTICLE on TC only serve as evidence of how much you think of yourself and your bullshit site? No one cares about you, your thoughts, and least of all that turd you call a “site”.
But I care, and I’m going to keep pointing out how much crap you are full of – until you just dry up and go away.
Spam is increasingly becoming a problem…if twitter does not start filtering, google will have a field day with google wave. I personally cannot wait!
It seems @foursquare is getting in on the game now:
http://twitter....atus/1965020884
ha ha yep, I actually just tweeted that out myself. Luckily, it’s opt-in.
Yeah, its fairly simple guys…
Just turn off the notifications or request your followers to turn off theirs.
The people who are complaining about it being spam don’t understand that this is a user option; they’re spamming unintentionally, so just turn off notifications and have fun.
Do notifications default on or off?
Agreed, internet savvy people should know better. It is now “open to the public”
3 of the 8 possible notifications are turned on by default, and you have the option to turn them off before anything is ever sent out.
From a virality perspective, in many ways what they are doing is absolutely brilliant. They are the early pioneers of “applications” on the Twitter platform. And much like the early pioneers on Facebook, like you mention, they are capitalizing on the fact that Twitter has no safeguards in place to stop spammy behavior.
Despite their spamminess, being early and spammy helped many, many Facebook developers secure an early position in that economy. I’m not saying that it’s kosher, but kinda like Plaxo, people forget about your spammy ways if you are a useful or fun utility rather than just a spammer.
If you are interested in checking out the game without getting in it, I posted a gallery of screenshots on Flickr here – http://bit.ly/1963xX
Cheers,
Randy
based on the screens looks like a game with the same mechanics as mafia wars
Yes, I get an impression of mafia wars…this has a cleaner design though.
All I can say, is don’t expect filters anytime soon.
It’s a big technical problem for Twitter (and don’t blame it on them, their system is simple for a reason). If you want it, bug client developers, cause you’re more likely to get it that way.
Why not just encourage users to create a “games” account. An alternate account that can be noisy and no one cares because no on follows it? That way your normal followers are not subject to the noise.
Yes we can block, but how many times do we want to keep doing that dance. It’s an issue that is sure to come up over and over again.
-B
excellent point brian. on the creators point that the backlash has been pretty minimial… charlie cuts to the point here: http://twitter....atus/1971356751
filters are easy enough with tweetdeck
you’re totally right here, mg, twitter fails its users who want to use it for any true experience by not allowing certain filters. Question is, will they do it? it’s been 2.5 years of feature requests and bugs, and that didn’t stop oprah from adding to the mass hysteria.
but…this just in: the internet is fun
timewasters, trivia games, some say it started with You Don’t Know Jack, now we have open platforms with messy backends and apis – and it would almost be absurd for any engineer to not build it into a game. Otherwise it’s just chaos. To many, Twitter is a place where companies, bands, artists do business, and microcelebs or people with otherwise unimpressive job titles in tech (aka “project manager”) can build faux fame in the company of A+K (aplusk) and oprah. It has no boundaries, and obviously neither does the data.
twitter is a runaway platform …FTW. (geeks love games)
on a psychosocial level, taking Twitter seriously, as if it has any true meaning beyond a game like spymaster is like donating to george costanza’s “human fund” and writing it off on april 15.
We are realtime system architects, our take is that:
(i) Its best to keep filtering off the Twitter infrastructure to keep things simple there
(ii) Filtering will be done by clients, its not trivial but it is doable.
Enough of this Twitter nonsense.
I agree that this is a problem. I haven’t been victimized yet, mainly because I am new to Twitter and am careful about who I follow to avoid spam.
I just look forward to the moment when I can announce “I WIN” on this game!
“Currently, various third party sites/services handle thing [filters] on top of Twitter, but it’s not enough if Twitter is really going to be a new form of communication.”
Why? I kinda thought the whole idea of Twitter was to be sort of a “dumb protocol”.
Adding filters to Twitter itself would destroy that paradigm.
And negate their future monetization plans.
@michaelmindes uses an interesting word in his comment up there. (victimized).
isn’t that a bit extreme? try explaining victimization from a spymaster dm to a person who was mugged in an alley.
kudos to eston bond for making me feel like a real life woman in the KGB from the confines of my lonely lonely office.
At the end of they day you CAN unfollow anyone who is playing spymaster – that said – the tactics suck, it decreases the value of Twitter for me and I’ll lose some valuable folks I follow because they playing and robo-tweeting. Spymaster needs to get with the spirit of twitter and cut the spam.
I think that’s a bit snotty myself. It’s a very clever little game. Addictive, fun, with great graphics. It’s a fun way to spend a couple of hours building up followers on twitter.
Twitter is ALL about how many followers you have.
http://blog.lis...ime-on-twitter/
Twitter is only “all about how many followers you have” if you’re in the business of selling something to said followers.
Yes, there are people on twitter who aren’t vacuously tweeting the details of their life nor hawking some product or service. You don’t know that because they probably blocked you already.
The solution to noise would be to limit trending topics and searches to just your contacts, like friendfeed can already do. Even cooler would be a specified number of degrees of separation.
Fight fire with fire:
http://twitter....atus/1975624788
Ok, maybe I’m missing something but shouldn’t Joe Stump get the pot/kettle award since Digg has announced plans to create the exact same effect? They now encourage Digg users to spam Twitter and flood everyone’s streams.
Joe, when Halloween comes will you be going as ‘kettle’ or ‘pot’?
Of course I may be missing something here and if so I will put the dunce cap on. If not I think Joe has some explaining to do.
I’m interested in playing the game but I don’t want to offend my followers, so I created a new Twitter account for this (and future) games. The bio says I will use this for gaming and as soon as I decide which organization to join I’ll use tweetlater to dm any new followers about details. I’m only interested in using this account for gaming so I don’t care that I lose followers over the game. I’ll just keep the game stream off my (and my friends) main account timeline and my FB updates.
Oh, and “soymaster”: http://twitter....uses/1966710589
I think this conversation also brings up a good point on what could be considered Spam on Twitter. People will keep following you when you tweet about endless internet marketing inanity, but god help you if you Tweet a Spymaster update or send an invite. I don’t think this is a test of Twitter as a platform so much as a test of what Twitter users want and do not want. I do find it odd that some have chosen to rag on this game in particular with so many other spam items out there on Twitter, but such is the nature of the Internet.
OMG I LOVE THAT GAME!
Good tip, Chris. Going to kill rest of the TC office now.
Despite their spamminess, being early and spammy helped many, many Facebook developers secure an early position in that economy. I’m not saying that it’s kosher, but kinda like Plaxo, people forget about your spammy ways if you are a useful or fun utility rather than just a spammer.