Kyle
Just a few weeks ago we brought you the story of the Fame Game. Fame was a side project for Adam Ludwin a principal at RRE Ventures in New York. The premise was simple, a raffle website “game” where the winner of the daily raffle got everyone who entered that days contest to follow them in one fell swoop. It was up to the winner to engage all the new followers into sticking around.
Well according to Betabeat, the Fame game is now over. The company sent out a Tweet on Thursday saying they planned to shut down the service because it violated Twitter’s terms of service. When it first launched Twitter didn’t seem to mind at all and in fact the team behind the Fame game thought they were clear because of a loop hole in the Twitter api.
“It was always a question mark about what Twitter would do,” RRE Ventures principal and Fame cofounder Adam Ludwin told Betabeat via phone. ”I have a lot of respect for the guys at Twitter and they gave us an extension, they gave us ideas about ways to change the app to conform more with what they viewed as in line with the spirit of their terms.”
More after the break
“When we developed Fame we read the Terms of Service very carefully and came to the conclusion that we weren’t violating specific rules,” Ludwin continued.to explain to Beatbeat. “Twitter did highlight rules they thought we were violating. [They believe] users of Twitter need to make their own decisions about who to follow. Our argument was that by playing Fame, users are opting in and signifying their intent to follow–not a specific person, but they’re deciding, yeah we want to follow that person. We tried to resolve it with them and we couldn’t. It was essentially a disagreement over the spirit of those terms.”
The Fame game was an innovative idea. I tried it for a few days and never won. They had hoped that as they built scale Twitter users could see follower increases in the thousands.
Although still just a side project for Ludwin, he did tell Betabeat that they may move the game to other platforms. Perhaps Facebook? Or Google+?
source: Betabeat
