Integrating WoW into Your Social Graph
Posted by 
Heartbourne on Wednesday, April 15, 2009 - 9 Comments Tags: RSS, facebook, hearthstone, twitter
Heartbourne on Wednesday, April 15, 2009 - 9 Comments Tags: RSS, facebook, hearthstone, twitter 
Sometimes I make new friends who play WoW, and the chances of them playing on my primary server (Proudmoore) are very low. I'm still interested in discussing WoW with them (because I'm that much of a nerd) and keeping up with what they are up to in game - whether they are leveling a character for the first time or just downing Sarth 3D for the first time.One way I do this is through the Hearthstone app on Facebook. Hearthstone is my favorite WoW-related Facebook app. First, you register your characters with the application. Then, through various means, the application "refreshes" your characters from the official WoW armory and adds level gains, major reputation gains, and new achievements into your friend's news feed and your profile mini-feed. It also has a slick interface on your profile page if you choose to add it there as a "box". Its a great way for me to brag to my friends about my epic achievements or mock my friends for taking too long to progress through content. Then again, I haven't exactly been on the cutting edge of raiding recently on any of my live characters, so things still come up like my PUG-ed Sarth 1D on my characters and I'm on the receiving end of the jokes.
The application used to automatically refresh your characters with no user action required, but scaling quickly became a problem as the WoW armory servers locked out the application. If you want to refresh, you have to manually tell the application to check for updates. If you allow offline updates, your friends can refresh your characters for you if you haven't done so in awhile and they are interested in what you are up to in the World of Warcraft.
If you are interested in using Hearthstone, check it out on Facebook. Our friends at WoWinsider interviewed Chris Nolan, author of Hearthstone, back in February. In the future, you may see an interview with him here on Project Lore! Comment with any questions you'd like us to ask him.
One of the cool things about Heartstone that I discovered is that it publishes an RSS feed of your activity. Using the magic of Twitterfeed, I added it to my Twitter! The server for the RSS feed is a little sketchy so I recommend running it through Feedburner, but its still fun. Follow me at @heartbourne if you want to see what I'm up to in WoW and more.
Reader Comments (9)
Two posts in one day!
Be careful iTZKooPA, Heartbourne's coming after you
Nice post, although I don't use any of those three things, especially since I get such a thrill of bragging to my friends in person!
I would like to dedicate my above posts to people like me who realize that saying "ZOMG1ST" or any variant of that statement is a complete waste of your time, as well as everyone elses time
Please, do the smart thing. Don't say 1st
maybe one day, there will be comments without people being d-bags and writing '1st', even when they aren't! :) I don't know enough IRL people to put any apps on my FB page, but it does sound cool...maybe in the future.
Ack I messed up my twitter link
Its http://twitter.com/heartbourne
Proudmoore FTW!! :-)
Almost 1/5 of the people i meet get hooked on WoW becuz of me...
Heartbourne,
Thanks for the excellent piece! You've nailed what I think Hearthstone is about, so again thank you!
A clarification -- your updates aren't actually seen in your friends news feeds anymore since the recent change to 'the stream'. They will still see them if they visit your facebook wall, but there is no longer an opportunity for them to be 'aggregated' on the home page. atm ;-)
Most excellent use of the rss feed too. It's buried in there so seldom used, so perhaps this will expose it a bit more.
Another item for bloggers is the wowhead like 'embed' logic (http://apps.facebook.com/hearthstone/news/14/item).
Looking forward to any questions y'all might have!
Heya,
Thanks alot for this.
One question though. Do you know how to find out what my characters URL feed is? I cant seem to find the URL for twitterfeed.com
Its buried a bit in the application. When you are in Hearthstone, go to the "toons" tab, and on the mini-feed, click "see all". The RSS feed is linked under "subscribe".
The server that hosts it goes down a lot. I was getting a lot of errors with feedburner for it and twitterfeed wasn't liking it, so what I do now is subscribe to it with a Google Reader account, and whenever the feed is up, Google caches it and I "share" it, and then feed my shared items to twitterfeed. It works pretty well, except I have to refresh Hearthstone, wait for the RSS feed to update and then share it from Google. It isn't instant or automated, but it gives me more control on when I want to tweet it and more stable.
Let me know how it goes!