Twittering from the World of Warcraft
by Mike Schramm 
May 1st 2009 at 4:00PM
Just in case you needed any more Twitter in your life (I'm getting to the point where I really don't), enter the PlayXpert Twitter widget, part of the PlayXpert gaming toolset, a free Windows application that you can download to run alongside your PC games (very similar to Xfire and that type of application). It's a little bloaty if all you want to do is run Twitter alongside WoW, but unfortunately, that functionality will never be available in an addon, as addons can't interact with any other outside sites.The poor man's solution here is to just run WoW in windowed mode and have your Twitter browser or client open right next to it -- you don't need a big application if you really need to be connected at all times. But if you want to livetweet your raid without sacrificing screen space to windowed mode, PlayXpert is one way to do it. It'll even do some autotwittering for you if you want.
And of course if you're on Twitter already, don't forget to follow our WoW Insider Twitter account. We've already hit our goal of over 9,000 followers (and yes, a video version of the podcast is coming soon), but we're constantly throwing out little pieces of news, discussion and even some giveaways over there, so follow us if you're interested.
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Fan stuff, Odds and ends, Blizzard, News items
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
rain.cz May 1st 2009 4:20PM
Its over nine thousaaaaaaaaand
peagle May 1st 2009 4:13PM
Reported for Spam
Agerath May 1st 2009 4:13PM
Stop, the hilarity is killing me.
Jay in Oregon May 1st 2009 4:40PM
I love that picture.
tresser May 1st 2009 4:19PM
To Anyone that would want to twitter while playing video games,
Please hang yourself.
No love,
Me.
P.S. On second thought, just change that top part to "anyone that twitters."
Kryxx May 1st 2009 5:15PM
/concur
Xora May 1st 2009 11:40PM
/agree
jbodar May 3rd 2009 8:19AM
This^3
Nekudotayim May 5th 2009 9:59AM
LMAO really hard! :D
MarkA May 1st 2009 4:25PM
Actually, this would be pretty easy:
What you do is write a program that:
1. Watches the clipboard for twitter:blahblhalbha
2. Sends tweets (You'd have to give it your user name and password.)
To use it:
1. Run the program.
2. Put in your credentials so that it can send tweets as you.
3. Run wow.
4. In the chat window in wow, type "tweet:Just sitting around the Undercity, @Thrall" - but don't hit enter. Instead, hit control-a to select the chat text you just typed, then control-insert or control-c to copy it to the clipboard.
5. The program, which is sitting there looking at the clipboard, notices the string "tweet:" and sends the tweet, clears the clipboard, and maybe plays a beep sound so that you know it sent. (or maybe a tweet sound)
Note: I'm not guessing here - my armory lookup program watches the clipboard, gets the information I request, and puts the results back into the clipboard.
Candina@WH May 1st 2009 4:28PM
twitter = epic fail
Justin Nolan May 1st 2009 4:46PM
Hunters (or any class really), feel free to follow me @wowhunter
CreamYoJeans May 1st 2009 4:50PM
i would totally let the dark lady molest me.
bbbooobb May 1st 2009 11:01PM
Another solution is to realize that you are playing a game alongside 12 million others. What you do in the game is not as exciting to others as it is to yourself. Your friends and family don't care if you are waiting for you Guild to form a Naxx group.
People need to get over themselves. It's amazing how many 'live journals' (twitter, facebook, myspace..) there are. The only people who seem to care about what they're doing is themselves. Stop writing about yourself! Stop thinking that the world gives a crap about your sorry wedding, sorry gaming, and sorry life.
nyctef May 5th 2009 8:39AM
Except for BRK. The guy is hilarious.
Willian May 1st 2009 5:17PM
Put WoW as a Non-Steam Application, create a desktop shortcut and launch it through the Steam system.
Just Press Shift+Enter and your good to go to any web page. I'm using this feature to take a quick look in wowhead and what's going on here in wowinsider.com
Willian May 1st 2009 5:20PM
ops, my bad: shift+tab.
Krick May 1st 2009 5:27PM
You certainly CAN have a wow add-on interact with the outside world. Wow mods can read and write character data to files. You just need a small "bridge" app that runs on your computer to watch the aforementioned file and when the data changes, it grabs the data and relays it to another app or website as needed. The opposite data path can work as well, you just need to have the wow mod check the file on a periodic timer, looking for changes.
There are multiple ways to know if the file has changed, however in WoW, you don't have access to the underlying filesystem information via LUA, so you'd have to implement some sort of timestamp in the first few bytes of the file that both sides update after changing the file contents.
It wouldn't be perfect, but I think that you could make a fairly workable twitter client or even an instant messenger client that interacts with a web server using this method.
...
Krick
http://www.tankadin.com
Barton May 1st 2009 5:32PM
Why would you twitter your guild when you can already /g?
Rahmen May 1st 2009 7:09PM
Windowed mode, plus a second monitor makes any internet activity easy while playing wow.