spreading jam

Alongside David Cameron’s Twitter Twat moment in the trending topic today were three seemingly disparate entries; M&Ms, Harry Potter and “What Piercing Are”.

On closer inspection, these turn out to be caused by automated messages from the service fun140.  They’re generated by quizzes with themes like “what colour M&M are you?”, “what piercing are you?” and “which Harry Potter character are you?”.

As with several other twitter services, you sign up, do your thing (in this case the quiz), and all your followers get a message about it.  Which, providing it’s opt-in, is alright for directory services (such as WeFollow) where you’re likely to do this only a few times (or even once) and the service may be of interest to your followers.

However, what colour M&M or kind of piercing you are might not be that interesting.  It also might get a bit irritating after a few people you’re following have tweeted it.  In fact, you might be contributing to the Twitter Litter.

As Sam’s mentioned before, Twitter Litter is created by canny people creating a meme that spreads, but doesn’t have a value for the community.  For me, this is what fun140 is creating and unfortunately, it’s making Twitter a little bit more like Facebook.

Now, I like Facebook, but it’s full of spammy applications that tell me which of the Sex and the City girls my friends are like.  Is this the future for Twitter, and will users put up with it?