F.A.Q.
Ahh, the lovely frequently asked questions. No website can live without a list of made up questions that are presented as being most frequently asked. Of course, this list is no other. At the moment of writing this document, no questions has ever been asked.
- Before you sign in
- After you've signed in
Before you sign in
How does it work?
We use a pool of highly trained monkeys... oh, who will buy that? We've created a few scripts that are launched every now and then and simply login to live.xbox.com to find your profile. It'll than scrape the achievements and the results are dumped in a MySQL database.
When a new achievement is found (being one that is not yet in our big evil database, we use your twitter credentials to post a little tweet. Really, it's all no rocket science.
Why do I have to give you my twitter credentials?
We agree, this completely sucks, but at this moment, twitter doesn't offer anything like oAuth or other systems to prevent this. They're working on it and as soon as twitter implements this, we'll stick our teeth in it.
What about this beta stuff?
For some odd reason, the achievements show game names that are different from the names in the game catalogue. We're trying to map them, but sometimes this fails. For this, we need more input and would love your help with this.
There's nothing you have to do besides playing as many games as you can, so we get loads of test data.
After you've signed up, and a beta spot opens up, we'll notify you through twitter (so make sure you follow xboxtweet on twitter). As soon as we feel comfortable with our software, we open it up to everyone straight away.
Why does this site look like twitter?
We like the layout of twitter and can't come up with anything better.
Why OpenID?
We're lazy. OpenID allows us to have others handle authentication for us, woohoo. Besides our lazyness, OpenID is simply cool. Why create yet another account, with yet another password? Here you don't have to!
If you don't have an OpenID identifier yet, find a nice provider at openid.net.
Where can I drop questions/suggestions?
The fine folk of GetSatisfaction host our customer service.
After you've signed in
Tweet current status?
Besides the achievements you unlock, we can also tweet your gaming status for you. This means that we update twitter with a post saying what game you're playing at that moment.
Like always, we try to prevent xboxtweet.com from excessive posting, so this feature is optional (and disabled by default).
Note that we post the game you play once a day. So if you play Halo 3 at this moment, we tweet it. Three hours later you decide to play again, we don't update. Tomorrow you're bored and play again, we tweet it. After an hour of Halo 3, you're going for mayhem in GTA IV, we tweet it.
Also note that this feature only tweets the game you're playing at the moment of checking (for times per hour). We don't inform your twitter friends about when you were last seen playing (or anything like that).
Not all achievements are posted!
Well, this document is supposed to be a F.A.Q and this statement isn't really a question, right?
Why aren't all achievements posted?
We don't like to overload your account with your achievement messages. We check every 30 minutes for updates. If you unlock more than one achievement, we notice, but only tweet about the most recent one.
And yes, we know of at least one member who actually waits for this 30 minute threshold before unlocking a new achievement (where possible).
Why don't secret achievements show up?
Secret achievements are evil. You can only see what they are once you've unlocked them yourself. Since XboxTweet doesn't play games itself (too busy checking your stuff), it has no clue what the secret is. To XboxTweet, all secret achievements look are the same, so they will get posted once.