I’m big on social networking – I like to share my media with anyone who cares to look. On my personal site, I’ve written software to share what book I’m currently reading and what games I’m playing. I even wrote up a php script that parses Netflix’s XML feed to show what movies I currently have at home. While I’ve moved my gaming activity from GregHowley.com to this site, the other two are still in my sidebar and I update them regularly.

When I first saw Raptr‘s new ability to share the games you’re playing on Twitter and Facebook, I jumped right on board. More connectivity! Horray! It wasn’t until I heard a comment in a recent episode of the Brainy Gamer podcast that I began to question things. I’ve since heard it referred to as twitter videogame spam. That’s a filthy label to slap on anything. It simply hadn’t occurred to me before then that notifications such as “GHowley began playing Thief: Deadly Shadows” or “GHowley installed Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena” would annoy people.

PC World recently wrote an article about this very thing. Are Twitter updates from games annoying? Personally, I haven’t been annoyed by it simply because nobody that I’m following on Twitter or friends with on Facebook is connected to Raptr. I suppose I’d imagined that it wouldn’t bother me, but I suppose if I got tweets that said “ARockLegend is playing Madden 2009” eight times a day, it would start to bug me.

One of Uncharted 2’s big features was going to be Twitter support: It would do exactly what Raptr does, by automatically updating your Twitter account with gameplay accomplishments. But it seems that during beta tests, when the testers were updating their accounts with the completion of each chapter, somebody realized that it was kind of annoying to get updates with that frequency. Since the game is too close to launch to make the change and have it adequately tested, they’ve simply disabled Twitter support for chapter updates, and will patch the game later to make certain updates individually optional.

I’ve been procrastinating a bit, because it feels sad in a way to disconnect part of my social network, but I’m likely to disconnect Raptr from Twitter soon. Perhaps to compensate, I’ll code up that Raptr-powered gamer card I’d been considering. As soon as I get the time, that is. Raptr mentioned that they wouldn’t mind.