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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.