Social Media Tilt

Posted by FelizB on Apr 18, 2012 in Guildwars 2 | 3 comments

A couple of minutes ago, this tweet shows up, sent by @Guildwars2:

Participating in the Beta Weekend Event?@Ravious over at @KillTenRats wrote a nice guide, check it out: Post at KillTenRats

Woohoo ! Where’s the announcement? I check Twitter and find nothing, except the usual stream of messages, not even when selecting for @Guildwars2. Facebook doesn’t have much either. The flood of messages on facebook is actually modest, since I have an account just for MMO related things. The Arenanet RSS feed hasn’t been updated since April 10th. And my email inbox has no GW2 related messages. Steam’s coming out of my ears.

After my third visit at Kill Ten Rats I finally notice a link to the original @Guildwars2 tweet ! A tweet 7 hours old. And there it is, a Facebook post as well, 7 hours old, too. But there’s still no RSS update, no blog post. nor is there any email.

And there I was, thinking I was set up well to keep tabs on my MMO environment: My RSS reader is subscribed to the feeds I am interested in, a couple of aggregator and news websites like ZAM or MMORPG, plus a lengthy list of blogs I like. Then there is Twitter and Facebook, both on isolated accounts, keeping the Foursquare Check-Ins and the sharing of cat pictures separate in my personal account. I am also subscribed to the newsletters of various games and gaming companies, which are filtered and labelled on, you guessed it, another separate email account.

This is serious information overload, and in the cases of Twitter, Facebook and the News sites, things get lost, since the news items are published in sequential order without any further options to filter by source. Things get, because often enough, the announcement of a “Game of Thrones” MMO is scrolled off screen by the competing babbling coming from @RandomGame and @UpcomingGame. And if that’s not enough, there’s a Zombie trivia  event by @YetAnotherGame going on as well.

What I am saying is this: News and Information is drowned out by the noise coming from social media. This is not being helped by the availability of multiple channels like Facebook and Twitter. The creators of news end up feeding all channels. Leave it to the recipient to filter out what he needs. But I don’t have a tool that can filter the news in a way I can process it. I know there are some efforts out there trying to make life easier, but those tools want to be found, and worst of all, need to be configured.

Until then, no “Game of Thrones” for me.