Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck
Social media has become a proverbial minefield for television and movie spoilers, but Google appears to be coming to the rescue with a new tool that will allow you to interact with friends on Facebook and Twitter without having Daredevil or Game of Thrones ruined for you.
According to CNET, the Mountain View, California-based tech giant filed for a patent Tuesday for a “system and method for processing content spoilers.” Essentially, the tool would detect and remove spoilers about TV shows, books, and movies from your social media news feeds.
Super-smart tracking and censoring
Those spoilers would remain hidden from your accounts until you’re up-to-date on your favorite types of media, something that has become increasing challenging in a world where on-demand viewing and binge-watching of films and programming is starting to become the norm.
Instead of a keyword based filter which blocks all content related to specific topics, the proposed Google filter would utilize technology that tracks all episodes of a show that users have watched and automatically censor content in a person’s Facebook or Twitter feed pertaining to shows and movies that the user had not yet seen, the website explained on Thursday.
The post itself would still be there, but if the system flags it as a spoiler, you would not be able to view it unless you wanted to – then the spoiler tag could be overridden and the post viewed. The system would be dependent upon users either manually logging into an account or allowing their media viewing habits to be tracked automatically Google’s software.
Bad news for Game of Thrones fans, though
While Google filed for a patent on the filet from the US Patent Trademark Office on Tuesday, that doesn’t mean that we can expect to see it anytime soon. For one thing, the patent does not even outline which social networks it would work with, nor is there any indication of how the company planned to integrate the filter into third-part sites like Facebook.
It sure as heck won’t be here in time for Sunday’s fifth-season premiere of Game of Thrones, CNN Money noted, and a Google spokesperson said that it may never even be released: “We hold patents on a variety of ideas – some of those ideas later mature into real products or services, some don’t. Prospective product announcements should not necessarily be inferred from our patents.”
We are crossing our fingers for this one!
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