Twitter's Impending Doom: Apps and Games

Do you have that one annoying twitizen in your following list who talks jibberish all the time? Do you wish you could politely filter some/all of their tweets without blocking them entirely? Well, you can't. But don't worry, things are going to get a whole lot worse.

Twitter, by its very nature, treats all tweets equally. That's great, under the assumption all tweets are created equally. Unfortunately, apps like Twibbon, which trade a small service (adding a tiny graphic onto your profile pic) in exchange for an automated tweet from your account, change that, and they are only the tip of the iceberg.

Soon I predict a whole ecosystem of Twitter apps and games vying for access to your precious account login, and it will result in one thing: massive increase in twitter noise. (And you thought just having tweets your friends write is bad enough.) App invitations, quiz results, and spam, will all become part of your daily twitter traffic.

FaceBook apps and games, whether you love them or hate them, have two redeeming features: (1) you can block invitations for them, and (2) they are prohibited by FaceBook from forcing you to spam your friends (by, for instance, only allowing you access to the results of a quiz by spamming 10 of your friends).

Pretty soon Twitter will have to start factoring in recipient-based filtering of tweets depending on the origin app, and I don't believe Twitter will be able to move fast enough, with such enormous tweet volumes, to stem the tide. Without that, Twitter will quickly reach lowest-common-denominator proportions, and users will simply move on.