Molly Wood, CNET Editor and host of the Buzz Report video series, has an excellent rant on how Twitter is ruining delay broadcasting because people keep posting spoilers. I know this is a common problem because I saw a handful of “shutting down TweetDeck until after LOST is over” tweets last week. This is an especially big problem for anyone who isn’t on the East Coast.
Molly not only points out the problem but she also has a solution.
You know how RunPee.com uses white text for its plot recaps and they’re visible only if you highlight the text? I propose that Twitter or TweetDeck or somebody implement that feature for tweets about TV, movies, live events–anything that includes the #spoiler hash tag. Read the tag, turn the text white, and let me decide if I want to know. Maybe make it so everything after the tag is white, so I can say, “Human Target #spoiler: it’s totally kickass.” After that, it’s all honor system, and I have a feeling the Twitter community would be happy to oblige.
Of course I’m pleased that she mentioned my site RunPee.com, again. But she does have a great solution. I think that in addition to implementing her suggestion that apps such as TweetDeck could easily add a feature to let us type in keywords, for example: “LOST, season premiere, I’m so confused.” Then whenever a tweet comes in that contains any of those words it will automatically be obfuscated and only display who it came from and the keywords that triggered the obfuscation.
That should be pretty easy to add to any Twitter client. And it wouldn’t be a bad idea to add it to many other applications as well. Such as Facebook.
And please, it’s lame to comment: you could just turn off TweetDeck or whatever until you see your show. What if you don’t want to? What if it’s something like a basketball game that I’m DVRing and I don’t think anyone would possibly tweet about it until after I get to see it. Then surprise, someone tweets, “OMG, did you see the ending to the Wildcat game? I can’t believe he made that shot!” I’m not interested in how I can adapt to solve the problem. I want to adapt the problem to suit me. That what User eXperience design is about.
So, to the TweetDeck devs. You have 3 months to add that feature or I’m going to build my own Twitter client. Molly will talk about it on her show. And I’ll capture the market based on that feature alone. Well, that and the ability to make column widths any size I want.
Get cracking. Your on the clock! :)
The problem with the #spoiler tag is that it's up to the person Tweeting to use it properly. If I know anything about the general population of Internet users is that this won't be relieable.
Your idea about additional key words is going to be pretty necessay, but far from foolproof. Sure, for a user watching a show with a simple name like Lost, it might be OK to filter on the show's names. But take into account people's misspellings, or even knowing a proper tag for a known show. (I imagine some shows and movies with longer names get some form of abbreviated Twitter slogan, or possibly mispelled, or typo'd becasue the text is being input on a small device…) or whatever…or maybe the show name is totally ignored in the tweet "Man can't believe that John Lock is secretely sleeping with Jack" or "Lst was great, can't believe it was all a dream"
Having to remember to tag your tweet with #spoiler just won't be reliable. Especially if you're using TWEETING as a real life communications medium while events are going on. For example, this is quite commen when American's are watching/listening to niche coverage of things like the Olympics (or cycling). Twitter is being used to host the real time discussion. Expecting those users to remember to tag each Tweet in a conversation with #spoiler isn't going to be reliable. (More specifics about this is when people find alternative feeds to sports broadcast in foreign countries.)
So, all in all, I don't think the solution will be as benificial as first thought…
@todd, your absolutely right. It isn’t a panacea. But baby steps in the right direction. When we have AI in our Twitter client then we’ll be set. But that’s probably going to be a while yet. :)
How do I stop my boss ruining films with his lunchtime spoilers?
We all eat lunch together at my company, which is really nice, but my boss has a really bad habit of spoiling films if a title is mentioned that he has watched… Same problem different universe…
For me, it's hands over the ears time :)
This is first time i am coming across this kind of issues,is that possible in twitter