Twitter Just Became a Games Platform

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.

- 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.

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.

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.