Rift's in-game Twitter integration and automatic tweets

Rift has built Twitter capability into its client so one can tweet messages (via /tweet) and screenshots (via /tweetpic) while in-game.

Of course Trion Worlds has done this to leverage the social web in an effort to drive adoption of the game.

In addition to user-initiated tweets, there is also the option to allow the client to tweet automatically. When this feature was first added during the open beta it immediately flooded the #rift hashtag with automatically-generated achievement spam. Trion quickly patched it to default to using a different hashtag, #riftfeed.

I'm interested to see what gets tweeted automatically and how spammy it is, but in order to avoid disturbing my tiny handful of followers with game activity, I've set up another account just for in-game tweets from the Rift client.

To see those tweets, check out the Twitter stream for Strat_in_game.

The capability for players to easily tweet while in-game, particularly to include screenshots, is quite cool. But the automatic tweets seem like useless spam if they can't be filtered by the player. I don't see how automatically-generated tweets are useful at all to players. Once Trion implements an Armory-like interface to character data over the web, it's likely to include achievements and anything else likely to be auto-tweeted.

Update: Shortly after launch, #riftfeed was flooded with auto-tweets, many for server-first acquisition of green and white items!