TechCrunch covered the Best Video Twitter worm yesterday, but seems to have missed the equally insidious opt-in Spymaster game. Unlike Facebook silliness, once authorized, Spymaster is much more in the face of your followers - freely tweeting game updates. Not only will you end up spamming your followers, you’ll notice your @mentions queue fills up with Spymaster tweets.
Spymaster may be for some folks, but it’s not for me. I prefer my games played with a joystick and on the plasma. And while I’m occasionally indulgent with an off-topic Twitter post, I respect my followers too much to partake.
So shortly after realizing Spymaster’s gameplay implications, I set about delinking them from my Twitter account. Spymaster’s FAQ doesn’t make it clear how to sever ties, a direct message to @playspymaster went unanswered, and a query on TechCrunch garnered no responses.
The good news is that I’ve found the simple solution and Twitter OAuth appears to work as billed. Instead of giving up our credentials, as we have in the past with third-party apps, Spymaster and Twitter are linked via OAuth (with your authorization). Once you’ve established an OAuth relationship, a new settings tab appears on Twitter itemizing these services. To assassinate Spymaster from your Twitter account, visit the Twitter website and:
- Click Settings
- Click Connections tab
- Click Revoke Access
Click to enlarge:
Bonus coverage: For those interested in tracking Spymasters viral success (while in beta), the short URL service they utilize (Bit.ly) publicizes stats. Visit http://bit.ly/info/playspy to see the total number of click-thrus categorized by geography.
