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Tweetcraft lets you tweet from Warcraft
Twitter is all the rage right now -- it's the easiest, quickest way to let anyone interested know what you're up to, and because it's so popular, it's also no surprise that we've seen quite a few Twitter and World of Warcraft mashup apps. wowTwitter is a separate update service just for news about your characters, WoWHorn is a script that lets you Tweet when you hit certain achievements, and though services like PlayXpert have let you Twitter from the game before, TweetCraft appears to be the first standalone application designed to do just that. After installation, it works the same way as an addon, though it's actually not -- addons can't directly connect to the Internet, so TweetCraft instead uses an outside script to read and write tweets into settings files, which the ingame addon then reads to get and send your tweets. It gets complicated, but you don't need to know all that to install and use it -- when you run the setup app, it'll put everything in the right places for you.As with all third-party applications, you should install and run this one at your own risk -- the FAQ has more information if you're wondering how things are stored or whether the app is secure. The app is completely open source, which means anyone who wants to can read the code, so if the author of the app was doing anything sneaky, we'd know about it. And yes, right now the app is not violating the ToS, but of course that's enforced according to Blizzard's whims, so again, use it at your own risk. If you're not interested in using this app, you can always update your status here on WoW.com using our own addon -- it's not Twitter, but it will let your friends keep track of you in Azeroth!But TweetCraft does look to be a clever, solid way to access and post to Twitter from right inside your World of Warcraft game. If you've been looking for a one-stop solution like this, there you go. Do be sure to follow us over on Twitter, too, if you haven't yet -- you never know when we might tweet something you'll want to see.Update: Apparently the app on default tweets all kinds of things you probably don't want to (like changing zones). There is probably a settings switch somewhere, but as always, user beware.
WoWHorn tweets your achievements
This is an interesting little system -- unfortunately, it's probably a little too complicated for most people to use, but the functionality is intriguing. WoWHorn is an open source application that basically monitors your achievements on the Armory, and will Twitter about it when you earn a new one. To get it up and running, you'll need the application itself of course, and you'll probably also need Ruby installed if you don't have it yet (OS X has it already, I believe, and Linux may as well). I don't think you'll need to input your actual WoW password (the program should be able to look up your info with just your character name and realm), but you will have to punch in your Twitter credentials if you want it to tweet for you. Once you've got everything working (and you'll have to ignore the errors, I got quite a few), you should see a tweet pop up in your feed whenever you get new points ingame.If you're a programmer type, you can read about the making of the app, and though, as I said, the app is probably a little too hacky for widespread use (it's not quite ready for primetime yet, and do you really want to run a separate application just to twitter about your achievements for you?), the functionality is the thing here. It would be cool for Blizzard to have the Armory interact officially with other networks on the Internet, either Twittering about your character or sending your profile out to Facebook.Not that anything like that should distract them from future content, of course. But if they want free advertising, allowing their subscribers to more easily share and disseminate information about their characters won't hurt.
