Every developer has the responsibility to keep the user’s experience in mind. This also includes the entire community of users. This application was built to give a benefit for spamming your followers. I disagree with that decision. I have no problem with them making that the default settings, but I do have a problem that there is such an incentive to use the notifications. It hurts the community as a whole because it abuses the Trending Topics and forces everyone to get annoyed with each other.

I watched Facebook explode from the inside during its days as a nascent platform, and I fully remember applications that were wildly spammy; no lecturing is required to make me remember things like Zombies/Vampires/SARS and their variants (which I still despise, because they have absolutely zero entertainment value internally.) At Facebook, we worked really hard to combat spam whilst still maintaining both a development environment that allows the platform to thrive at the creation level and people to have fun at gaming in the social environment.

This is a problem inherit of any social platform, and something that Twitter needs to deal with now. I’d much rather have this flaw exposed with a relatively harmless game than one day having a porn spam application storm Twitter.

Twitter needs to develop a system that will work in all scenarios, or in a few months Spymaster will be the least of Twitter’s problems.