It’s gone way beyond snowballs and shoes. Not only are there at least three separate “shoe throwing” applications on Facebook, now you can throw just about anything at your friends, from watermelons to sheep.
That’s fine. It’s not my cup of tea, but I know a lot of people enjoy such things. But, thankfully, Facebook lets me block these applications to prevent flooding my Facebook newsfeed stream with messages from these apps, like: “Bob threw a show at you. Throw one back!”
Yesterday, I got the following in my Twitter stream:
I just won a fight against @mrblog on Tweefight. I won! Do you want to fight? Try now http://tweefight.com/?opp=filos
It turns out Tweefight is a new service/game launched by buddy Luca Filigheddu. Clearly, a lot of people love this kind of thing. As noted above, I’m not one of those people.
When someone fights you on Tweefight, a “tweet” link is generated that posts a tweet of the type shown above. I have scripts in place that send all @mrblog references to my cell phone. The last thing I want to see in that stream is a “so and so threw a shoe at you” message. Unfortunately, Twitter doesn’t have a mechanism to block such tweets.
So I asked Luca if he could add an “opt-out” option to the Tweefight site, so if someone engages me in a “battle” on there, instead of getting a “tweet” link, they will see a notice that I’m not interested in receiving such messages. He agreed to implement an opt-out, which I think sets an excellent precedent for all future such “entertainment” applications. Since twitter doesn’t have the equivalent of “block this application”, such sites are going to have to police themselves.
Apparently the site is getting a lot of usage (so much so it was off-line much of the day yesterday) so it’s nice that Luca is so receptive to suggestions. It looks like Tweefight will do just fine without me – which is terrific – to each his own. 🙂
I have to be honest, I immediately took your suggestion because it’s you and I value your opinion a lot. You are the only person among 25.000 who used the service in the past 24 hours who complained about this and maybe I wouldn’t have taken the suggestion if another user would have asked for it.
Tweefight doesn’t actually send any automated message, it’s up to the person who fight against you: he can inform you that you won/lost, or just try another fight. We just “facilitate” this by pre-compiling a tweet for the user, if the user presses on “tweet this”.
Anyway, I can understand that if too many people fight against you and send you that tweet, it could become annoying. Opt-out will be ready in the next version, which should be available next week.
Thanks!
Luca
Yeah, Luca, I understand. I do appreciate it.
I went to the site before making my specific suggestions and saw that the posts were via a “tweet this” button.
Like I said, I realize lot of people like these kinds of things. While I may be the first to complain about the messages though, I’m sure I won’t be the last if the service/game continues to be popular. Supporting opt-out will send a powerful message that Tweefight is fighting the good fight (so to speak) – and will set a good tone for other such game apps that will surely follow.
[…] I spoke briefly about Tweefight, an App/Game that effects tweets that look a lot like the kind we often see on Facebook: I just won […]