Games for Social Networks is a book, forthcoming.

There’s no private space on Twitter to play. Everything I do is published to the feed because the feed is effectively all the app is. That means I don’t play in private and share in public. On Twitter, everything I do is seen by everyone, creating not only too much sharing but too much noise for my followers. That’s why to date, users share achievements on Twitter for a game - but the game is played elsewhere.

There is no “app platform” for Twitter. Games on Twitter need to use Twitter to support them but right now, any game is virtually indistinguishable from anything else I might do on Twitter.

Twitter is not visual. Unless we’re hearkening back to the land of text based adventure games, making a game with just words and no images is limiting and boring.

Omgpop CEO writes about the reasons why games on Twitter are not flourishing. I think the first one is the real killer, not so much the latter ones - I believe they could be circumvented in terms of gameplay, not monetization though… I wrote about the Twitter game design challenges some time ago at Gamasutra blogs, check it out: http://bit.ly/41h7Fe