Spymaster - the twitter game

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/28/spymaster-the-twitter-game-that-will-assassinate-your-time/

Who doesn't like a game - especially one on twitter?

Spymaster uses Twitter's network to play its game. Users tweet out what sorts of things they are doing (ie assassinating people). There has supposedly been a lot of backlash over this game, as the game seems to tweet out fare more than it needs to (looking like spam to some people).

However, the game appears to be very popular. It takes advantage of the social network and cascades in order to survive. When you try to kill someone, not only will you tweet it, they will also tweet it. Thus, anyone who is following you or the other person will get the message. Herein lies the cascade - not only will players get the message, but due to the structure of twitter, nonplayers will also get the messages. These tweets encourage other players to join in, thus expanding the playerbase even more, starting (hopefully for Spymaster) a cascade of people who will join the service.

This is a post that talks about the development of a game using the power of an up and coming social networking engine like Twitter.
http://hubpages.com/hub/Spymaster-Twitter-Game

Spymaster is a game in which people virtually assassinate others and in the process virtually buy weapons, purchase items, and play this game for fun. This game is in the early stages of beta testing, but it is becoming increasingly popular at a fast rate. It is known that companies like to advertise currently using websites, and it's even becoming bigger on sites like Facebook and Myspace. However, the company that has teamed up with Twitter to bring Spymaster to the social networking web is making a great investment. By allowing Twitter to develop an information cascade that is a natural development, the game will spread at an exponential rate. Social networking websites create information cascades with ease due to the large social network trees in existence. By using Twitter to play and run a game such as Spymaster, the game will ultimately pick up users due to the information cascade created, and the Twitter posts will even act as free advertisements for the game.