Stepping over that Twitter line

I like Twitter so don’t get me wrong here but all you people playing the Spymaster would you please piss off. Seriously, it’s bad enough that we are having to suffer through using a service that is proving itself to be prone to hack attacks, phishing attacks, non-stop marketing bullshit from so-call social media gurus but now we’re having timelines being invaded by a game that can only be played over Twitter.

I was pretty well okay with that up until this morning. I have gotten pretty good at being able to make up for Twitter’s, and by extension – Twitter clients, total lack of timeline filters and ignore the more irritating uses of hashtags and idiotic retweets. I was even getting good at adding this Spymaster crap to my mental Twitter filter list but when you invade my inbox that is crossing the line.

It’s not so much the game itself but the people playing it so here’s a big HINT – I do not need to see Direct Messages showing up in my Twitter client or more importantly my Inbox asking me to join some stupid ass spy ring. As Joe over at the Joe Stump Blog puts it

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. So what makes this so abusive? The game gives money and income boosts the more you tweet out about the game. Turning off said notifications can greatly reduce your chances in the game. Basically, it was engineered from the ground up to promote spammy behavior.

Add what Eric Eldon at VentureBeat has to say about this stupidity

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.

You get that you twitless Spymaster players – you are spamming us. Period.

You are joining the ranks of the very people that many of you have railed against in the past. You are becoming spammers – you are crossing that line.

I’m willing to fine tune my mental filters to try and ignore the normal Spymaster crap that is adding noise to the Twittersphere but the moment you encroach upon my Direct Messages and my Inbox you’ll only get one thing from me – Blocked.