chill the chirp.
Blocking bad: In an effort to bolster viewership of their five seasons of Breaking Bad, whose final episode aired on AMC on September 29, Netflix unveiled a shiny new website that hides “Breaking Bad” spoilers from your feed, called Spoiler Foiler. Oh, but spolier alert? This idea already was already concieved by a seventeen-year-old web developer, a New Hampshire girl named Jannie Lamere.
The site, rife with Netflix and Breaking Bad ads, finds tweets “containing any and all words associated with the show,” and blacks them out, the userclicks to reveal the content if they decide. The Huffington Post says that while the app is a good idea, it’s not without its flaws, including pretty limited censorship: “Spoiler Foiler seems to be effective, but the only way to read a censored version of your timeline is on the Spoiler Foiler site. Your timeline on Twitter.com, TweetDeck and the like will all be normal.”
This past May, MotherJones feautured Jennie and her Chrome extension called Twivo, which “allows Twitter users to censor their feeds from mentioning a certain TV show (and its characters) for a set time period.” She won the grand prize at the TVnext Hack event amid a field of 80 other competitors– all of them male– where she was not only the lone female who presented a project, but also stood out as the only developer to work solo. She’s already been approached byFurious Minds, a tech company that intends to help her market the final product.
“We’re always interested in the convergence between TV and social media, and Jen’s hack was awesome, not to mention she did the entire thing herself,” says Ashley Swartz, CEO and founder of Furious Minds.
“She came up with the idea for Twivo the night before the competition,” Mother Jones detailed, “and it took her 10 hours and 150 lines of code to complete. It works as an extension to the Google Chrome browser: A user can type in the key words she would like to block, and for how long, and make those Tweets disappear….Once a user is done blocking the show, the Tweets reappear.”
Would you rather utilize Netflix’s new site to view your feed, for Breaking Bad and one assumes future programs, or Jennie’s revolutionary browser extension? –– Casandra Armour
