Wiki Tiki Utility: WoW.com Profiles

Spread the love

d6f215f871cc094b18f7f7f44a9200f8

Okay, so, I’ve got this idea. What if we combined Facebook’s recent activity feed, Twitter’s ability to tell anyone what you’re doing at any given time and list of followers, and your WoW characters? And then we made it all available in an addon that records all that stuff automatically?

Wait, what do you mean it’s already been done? Oh yeah, it has – it’s this week’s Wiki Tiki Utility, WoW.com Profiles!

Formerly known as WoW Insider, the new WoW.com brought with it an unexpected feature besides the usual rebranding and redesign – social networking! WoW.com Profiles are sort of like Twitter, Facebook, and a blog all wrapped up in one. You can sign up with your AIM or AOL username (WoW.com is owned by AOL, after all) and get started right away.

Taking full advantage of WoW.com Profiles also requires you to install their addon and associated application. These two work together – the addon collects data, keyed to a unique key in your profile settings, and the application parses them and turns them into activity posts. WoW.com has a pretty thorough guide to getting started!

Here’s a whirlwind tour of available features (and feel free to browse my profile while you’re at it):

  • Feed Notes and In-Game Blog Posts: Available both outside the game (from the “Post a Feed Note” box on your profile) and inside it (using the /note command or the WoW.com Addon minimap button), this is basically Twitter for WoW, without the character limit. If you’re about to head out for a raid, want to share ongoing activity with your loyal profile followers, or simply want to say “urgh Death Knights are so OP why are we losing this AB????” then the Feed Notes are there for you! Feed Notes can also be filtered to show posts from your friends or your guild – how cool would it be to have your whole guild on here, chattering away even when you’re not inside the game?
  • Blogging: That’s right, your WoW.com Profile can also double as your own blog! Granted, I haven’t done a whole ton of it (only a few posts here and there), but if you wanted a blog with basically zero setup, WoW.com Profiles has you covered. No RSS feeds for blogs yet, unfortunately, but keep in mind this is basically just an impressive first draft – that feature could always be coming down the road! The editor’s easy to use, and basically covers what you need – text formatting, pics, links, the foundations of an actual blog posting tool.
  • Photo Gallery: Yep, you can add photos too! It’s got an upload limit of four at a time, and is what feels like the least stable part of the site at the moment (I got lots of out-of-memory errors trying to upload all four screenshots at once, and one of my screenshots seems to have a perpetually broken thumbnail), but it’s there and it’s at least mostly functional. It does automatically create a nice slideshow-type feature for you in your galleries.
  • Followers: No social networking site would be complete without a list of people who think you’re actually interesting, and WoW.com Profiles are no different. Granted, I only managed to accrue 3 followers (one of whom was Alex Ziebart – hi Alex!), but if you wanted to, this could easily be your main “home” for WoW players!
  • Individual Character Pages: While your profile does contain info about all your characters, it turns out each of your characters gets their own pages too! As you can see, my warrior’s been pretty busy.

There’s probably even more that I missed, but that’s probably enough to get you started with your WoW.com Profile. Go on over and check it our for yourself – and follow me. I totally need friends!

Mondays are Wiki Tiki Utility days here at TNB! Stop from The Stoppable Force highlights a resource from the Twisted Nether Wiki’s Big List of WoW Utilities, hopefully giving you a nice boost to your Intellect – or at least your skill at World of Warcraft. If you’ve got a utility you’d like to see listed on the wiki, or one you’d like to nominate for the Wiki Tiki Utility post, please send an email to stop AT twistednether DOT net with the subject “Wiki Tiki Utility”!

4 comments to Wiki Tiki Utility: WoW.com Profiles

  • Hi! 😀

    Improved blog functionality is one major thing we want to work on after a big pass of bug fixes across the board. Plenty of other things too of course, but the blogging bits are what excite me the most. I’m a blog nerd, after all.

  • That’s fantastic! Anything that gets more voices in the blogosphere, in my opinion.

    I also noted that my constantly-broken-thumbnail issue was fixed last night when I visited. Apparently the webmonkeys at AOL are hard at work. 😉

  • Gotta say, I don’t know if it’s the Mac version, or because I’m on an EU server, but I can’t get the addon to upload to my profile page here – it crashes every time. >_<

    I do like the idea of this, I’ll probably be more into it once it’s out of beta though.

  • I’m not sure I want it announced what quests I’m doing, since I pretty much just do the same 4 daily quests over and over and over again…