Mike Isaac

Recent Posts by Mike Isaac

Netflix Doesn’t Want Twitter to Spoil “Breaking Bad” for You

breaking_bad_money_bedFor the past summers, I have had a Sunday evening ritual.

At 5:50 pm PT, I turn off TweetDeck and refuse to check my Twitter app until 10 that evening.

Why? Because someone on the East Coast will invariably spoil the evening’s episode of “Breaking Bad” before it airs on the West Coast, where I live.

Netflix knows people like me exist, and it wants to help. The company launched a cutesy one-off site on Monday, Spoilerfoiler.com, which seems to take care of the problem at a high level.

Pretty straightforward: Hook your Twitter account up with the app, and it’ll redact any tweets in your feed that contain “Breaking Bad” references, like this:

It works by searching out certain keywords, as GigaOm noted earlier, and was made for those in the U.K. who have to wait several hours after the U.S. airings before the show runs overseas.

Imperfect as it may be (I’ve seen tweets blocked out that aren’t really spoilers), it’s still a nice way to avoid an accidental outing of the current episode’s intense events.

I only wish Netflix had launched the product at least a little bit sooner — the series finale airs Sunday.

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Another gadget you don’t really need. Will not work once you get it home. New model out in 4 weeks. Battery life is too short to be of any use.

— From the fact sheet for a fake product entitled Useless Plasticbox 1.2 (an actual empty plastic box) placed in L.A.-area Best Buy stores by an artist called Plastic Jesus