
Twitter Just Became a Games Platform - rrhoover
http://ryanhoover.me/post/47205151064/twitter-just-became-a-games-platform
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dewitt
The challenge is that people really _really_ don't want to see game invites /
gifts / in-app purchases in their friends streams, unless they're personally
playing the game, too (and even then they don't always like it).

Imagine you follow @timoreilly for his technical and political insights, only
to see farmville spam in 3 out of 4 of his posts. That would get very old,
very quickly.

Twitter is awesome partly because of the lack of app-specific streams, but it
necessarily limits the types of things you can do on the platform. Now, they
may reverse course on that direction as a consequence of pushing Cards so
hard, but they're not there yet, and arguably will steadfastly continue to
avoid going there.

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lnanek2
I went to a mobile gaming summit once, and amusingly, companies were able to
point out Facebook's moves away from this open season approach in their
download number graphs. Facebook limits you to one picture per post? Big drop.
Facebook hides game posts from people not playing the game? Big drop. Etc.. So
I imagine if Facebook was forced to eventually start limiting game posts,
Twitter will eventually have to follow, as you say.

~~~
tracker1
Good.. personally, I block _every_ app invite I get in FB... I don't want it
on Twitter, that has a much bigger overall stream to me. I liked twitter as it
was.

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zabar
I think what twitter announced is not related to what he is writing about.

\- Twitter : They are going to have a nice display of your app in their
twitter feed if you put the right meta tag, with rating, pricing, and
description (App Card <https://dev.twitter.com/docs/cards/types/app-card>)

\- Post : You can do deep linking on Twitter with native apps, about specific
content of the app (which is the opposite of App Card that looks like a
generic promotion of your app).

Deep linking is already possible, and used. But usually apps are sending you
first to the browser, because you might be on desktop, and then redirect you
to the right part of the app if it's installed.

In any case, I wouldn't call twitter a games platform. And by the way, there
have been several twitter games in the past, without much success.

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jyap
Is "Mobile app deep-linking" just custom iOS URL schemes?

Also, let's not go so far as to call Twitter a "Games Platform". A games
platform is some like Facebook Games or Xbox. It's not as if Twitter now
suddenly hosts your games.

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idunno246
Of course, you want different behaviour for the links if youre not on a mobile
device, or are and dont have the game, or have the game installed. These links
dont help with that.

~~~
wahnfrieden
Do we know that they can't have different behaviors if you're on mobile or
desktop? I wouldn't assume that - it does say this only works on a few mobile
platforms.

It would be amazing if we could link to a "share page" for our product if
you're on Twitter on a desktop, and the actual app if you're on mobile.

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nicholassmith
Title isn't quite matching with the takeaway. Twitter has become an efficient
distribution platform, not a gaming platform.

However, Twitter has always been an efficient distribution platform, that's
not new, how they're doing it with Cards is but it's still building on the
fact of brevity. Make it interesting quick or go home.

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tibbon
I thought people had various games on Twitter around 2008 or so.

~~~
waterlesscloud
Yeah, I was trying to remember what they were. There was one that spread
pretty far pretty fast, but it ended up annoying people so much that it died.
Can't remember what it was, though. Some sort of Mafia Wars type thing?

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photorized
When I was playing an iPad game that was insisting on sharing everything, I
had to set up a separate Twitter account for game spam. Still, an interesting
phenomenon. I remember analyzing Xbox in-game tweets, saw interesting
patterns.

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zitterbewegung
The comments seem to be justified that this is deep linking. The better
question would be are we going to get flooded with tweets doing this deep
linking in twitter.

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240p
This looks interesting, but can someone tell me if this is similar to facebook
games at the moment, and/or how it sets itself apart from competitiors?

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mtgx
Does that use any of Twitter's API's? Because we know how credible Twitter has
become with access to their API's lately...

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cleverjake
its a card. its their own apis. the apis twitter have been killing are 3rd
party access to content, not 3rd party supply of content.

~~~
lnanek2
they've been killing anything that acts remotely like a client. one of my apps
was killed for letting users post scores directly. so they certainly do kill
3rd party supply of content if it looks anything like a client. it's sort of
like Google Groups where I can get banned just by opening a lot of tabs at
once to read later. their enforcement is pretty mindless and probably
automated.

~~~
cleverjake
posting content is not the same as supplying content. cards are just meta tags
that are used when twitter crawls the link that is posted.

