Social Game Spam Can Cost You Your Friends?

This is especially true with some of my favorite games from Xynga like Mafia Wars and Cafeworld because you have to post when you need items or level up. This is all a part of social gaming because it requires you to have to interact with your friends and family to accomplish goals and that is all part of corporative play.

With that being said since social games are considered the game industries biggest growth opportunity because there are 200 million Facebook gamers per month and most of the gamers spend 55 minutes or more a day on Facebook Games. So this issue of spamming is just beginning because we are just at the start of this ever growing trend!

While sitting in these lectures I did not realize that the accomplishment posts were becoming so annoying to users. I thought people enjoyed seeing what people were doing in their free time and help them accomplish goals by responding to these posts.

Sure people created fan pages entitled I don’t care about your farm, or your fish, or your park, or your mafia! Other people just hide those messages from friends via their live feed or worst of all they delete the friend entirely because they just do not want to deal with all those accomplishment posts.

But to call it spam?

Moreover, how is Facebook dealing with these issues? They created a game Dashboard which allows you to see what games your friends are playing and it helps you find other games based on genre; they have done away with notifications so no more annoying pop-ups with in a window on Facebook.

Many fellow attendees were concerned about the issue of spamming as well and many questions were being asked to Gareth Davis, who heads up Games at Facebook. He brings to his role as Platform Manager many years of experience in the traditional game industry, where he produced titles for leading publishers such as Sega and Electronic Arts.

With his experience he offers this one-piece of advice: Only post your accomplishments when they are monumental and pivotal to the game play. Since Social gaming and friends are the most engaging part of online life, it is important to share but not over share.

He did not suggest any actual plans that Facebook has to cut down on the need for so many accomplishment post but since Facebook makes major functionality changes almost every six months it would not surprise me if we had some spam removing capabilities in the next design roll-out.

Lesson of the day: Enjoy your Facebook games but be mindful of your friends and only post your monumental accomplishments within your favorite games.

Comments (3)

Mark C. Barlet

March 12, 2010

Votes: +0

• 
• 
• 

...

I have had to remove "friends" because of this issue. Not good friends, but people that I knew in High School and so on. I have one person who spammed me so bad (150+ a day) that many of us banded together and dropped her in mass.

Brandon

March 12, 2010

Votes: +1

• 
• 
• 

...

I've seen where the facebook games now want you to post to your wall so you can get more in game items by sharing to your friends the items or by them clicking to increase your production.
You can easily click on the right side of someones achievements and hit hide, and now it asks hide everything from this person or everything from this app. Simply ignore the apps and you won't have the spam anymore. Cleans up news for me and still lets me keep in contact with my old friends who like to play games and show off their accomplishments. Later if you want to see from that app. you can remove it from hidden as well.
I hope this helps anyone who is being bothered by facebook "spam" from all these games that want to publish what everyone is doing.

Michael

March 14, 2010

Votes: +0

• 
• 
• 

...

Agree with Smallfuse. I know while back when I played some of the games when you load the app you have the option for it to not be in your feed. Heck, I didn't even like spamming myself with some of those games.

Write comment

Email Name		Comment smaller | bigger
		Subscribe via email (registered users only) Write the displayed characters Add Comment