Social networks have allowed the average user to create a ton of messages to people they know and don’t know.  On Twitter, any 140 character message you can think of can be broadcasted to a few to hundreds and millions of people.  On Facebook, every time you level up in a game like Farmville, you can broadcast your acheivement to your friends.  This can engage the people you know, but can also overload many of your closest and most interested friends.

When developing games like Farmville, developers have had to constantly adjust the dynamics between users.  Some players will broadcast every acheivement to their friends, with no regard to how many messages they actually send out.  They will invite every user they know plus some, even if they don’t play the game.

Allowing these different means of communication and marketing is great for the developer.  They don’t have to spend massive amounts of money on marketing and gaining the trust of new users.  Having a friend who plays a game validates that the app is trustworthy and is worthy of a look.  This is a very valuable connection that most games take advantage of.

Social games also have a method to post your achievements to your news stream.  Players are enticed to post an entry to show off how well they are progressing through the game.  This is similiar to showing off trophies and can help create competition to see who is better at the game.

While these techniques can be advantageous in the short-term, it can become a disadvantage as time goes on.  If I don’t play a game or have lost interest after playing once, I may consider these streams full of trash.  Filtering is the least of possible actions I may take.  Therefore it is important that developers provide a method of giving users options to find users who actually engage in the applications you’re posting about, limiting the audience to those who are actually interested in the notifications.  If I play a game, I will be more interested in reading notifications in such games.

For those more restrained players, posting their achievements can be viewed as a nuisance to their friends.  They won’t post each notification because their friends aren’t known to respond positively.  For these players, popping up a box every couple of minutes will only annoy the player and lead to a poor game experience.  Having an option to post to just those friends who actually engage in a game could entice these restrained players to post more notifications.

Finding the right balance among your players is critical to keeping your game positive in the minds of everyone, players or not.  Not finding the right amount can cause many more problems.