Has it really been less than a month since I saw the way the wind was blowing and asked “Since when did twitter become facebook“?
That was a post aimed squarely at the creators of the Spymaster game, although a (dis)honourable mention went out to twitterscope – who seem to have changed their webpage…
But I will say this for the Spymaster team. They listened to the public and gave people the option to opt-out. So much kudos goes to them for that. I signed up for it and almost completely forgot my rage. But recently I’ve seen the one thing that really annoyed me about facebook. It’s infected twitter and gone round the twitterverse faster than swine flu. The inane quizzes have hit twitter.
I realise that people look for this sort of thing when they’re bored but surely, with the sheer scale of twitter, it’s possible to find someone tweeting about something that you’re interested in – then all you need to do is drop them a message then Bang! And the dirt is gone… Whoops, sorry! I mean ta-da! You have a new friend who shares at least one interest with you. Maybe you can learn something from them, maybe they can learn something from you…
I know one thing though. Your followers aren’t going to learn anything about you from these arbitrary quizzes that you’ve taken online in 30 seconds. I won’t learn anything about you from the What animal are you most like? quiz and, unless I’m going to eat you (and believe me that’s not going to happen!), the What flavour ice-cream quiz is no use either.
Maybe I’m being a bit harsh. There is one quiz that I’d like to see people take – the What Muppet are you? quiz. But that’s only if the answer that comes up every time is “A right proper muppet who keeps clogging other people’s streams up with this pointless shoite!”
Of course once one game arrived then it became open season. I’ve noticed a few tweets starting up for the 140 Mafia game. Thankfully I haven’t had many, but it’s only a matter of time.
I hate to be the one to say “I told you so”, but I’m sure I may have mentioned the PirateNinjaMafia War – lo and behold – it came true!
Now, do you think I should start talking about the “Everyone in the world give Ethan a fiver” game that I can feel in my water? It’s coming – it’s just over the horizon… I’m sure of it!
And now I read on Mashable that someone’s ported Pokes to twitter… And I quote from the Poke.ly website: Poke.ly was launched with the aim of providing users with a new form of expression in the social space!
New form of expression!?! Is that like the iPhone’s “new features”? New to the product but been around for years elsewhere? I’m a huge fan of Open Source, and the fact that twitter has such an open attitude to use of its API is fantastic. There are some great apps out there that tie into twitter and use the information in a fun and constructive way.
But all these pointless (anti) social networking games are just annoying. Please people, take them to one platform and keep them there, let the rest of us have somewhere we can share thoughts.
I’ll be over on friendfeed…
It took me a while, but in January this year I found 
(OK, I made those last two up just for double entendre’s sake – but you’ve all seen Facebook, you know what it’s like!)
