Twitter transformed itself from a simple, sharp SMS-serving system into a cultural phenomenon, and like most things described as “cultural phenomena” by people who don’t really understand them it’s already running into trouble. This is because Twitter’s expansion strategies are mainly “Total surprise”, “Something they totally weren’t expecting” and “Quick, quick, someone Google the phrase ‘business plan’ right now!”
While there are excellent, entertaining and informative twitterers out there, finding them makes panning for gold look like an assembly line – and we’ve already reached the point where people are being told “DO NOT TWITTER.”
1. Uncharted 2’s idiotic Tweet-flood discontinued
How do you know when a service has sprinted past “cool” and into “corporate crap?” When companies can reprogram consoles to abuse it for free advertising. Step forward Sony’s “Uncharted 2″ for XBox. The game came with an option to post updates to players twitter feeds, because when XxX-JingleKiller-XxX completes level fifteen is life or death information. Assuming you’re an enemy on level sixteen. Otherwise not so much.
The tweets read “completed Chapter 15 in #UNCHARTED2″, and as you play through the single player game multiple such messages and made per hour. If you know about twitter you can already see what the scumbags were up to: that hash-mark is a “tag”, and when a topic is tagged by lots of players it rises through the rankings and more people see it.
There’s no way even Sony could think everyone in the world would want to know about the rate of level completion – but on release, the game would convert millions of XBoxes into a massive spam attack on the service providing powerful free advertising for the game – yes, exactly the sort of thing Russian hackers are arrested for. Luckily, they left this feature in the early demo sent to reviewers – the sort of people who notice this sort of annoyance – and the feature has been “discontinued”. Presumably as slimy marketing executives shake their fists and shout “And we would have made it too if it wasn’t for those meddling reviewers!”
2. The Most Popular Player
How can an NFL rookie win the hearts of fans and ensure a long and profitable career? Train hard? Make game-winning plays? Tell them they’re dimwit idiots who work in McDonalds? If you’ve already worked out it’s the third option, well done on understanding how this sort of article goes. We’ll be more original with joke setups when players like Robert Henson are more original about being assholes.
Technology has had one positive effect, though: twitter has accelerated the “overpaid meat puppet rage-to-public-apology time” to under twelve hours. He sent his angry twits on Sunday night and was publicly apologizing Monday morning, so we assume most of the intervening time was a conversation with management where the words “dimwit”, “idiot” and “what the hell are you doing” were used – but maybe not on the target Robert would have preferred.
3. German Election Action
How much would you pay for a tweet? Seventy three thousand dollars? That’s the price facing some German polling station workers under investigation, after some remarkably accurate “exit poll” figures were posted on Twitter – hours before any official exit polls were completed, and definitely before it was legal to post any such results.
This is a real case of Twitter short-circuiting the rest of the brain. Local election results aren’t exactly the sort of paparazzi fodder that celebrity-scooping careers are made of, it’s not like they weren’t going to be public soon anyway, and of all the environments on Earth “inside a polling station” is pretty much the biggest “You’re not allowed to tell people what happens here” outside of Scientology Headquarters. So some stupid worker can look forward to paying five hundred dollars a character.
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