So, the addon that’s been on everyone’s lips lately has been TweetCraft. It’s a client that allows information from outside the WoW client into it, and vice versa. It reminds me of a great(!) idea I had one time, that was a plugin for MSN (or !Y or AIM, whatever) that would let you converse with your guild/friends list in-game. Turns out I wasn’t the first one to have such an idea, but the software limitations made it impossible.

But back onto TweetCraft. It’s treading on dubious ground. It’s (in theory) violating Blizzard’s EULA.

D. use any unauthorized third-party software that intercepts, “mines”, or otherwise collects information from or through the Game or the Service, including without limitation any software that reads areas of RAM used by the Game to store information about a character or the game environment; provided, however, that Blizzard may, at its sole and absolute discretion, allow the use of certain third party user interfaces;

E. modify or cause to be modified any files that are a part of the Game Client in any way not expressly authorized by Blizzard;

This being said, how does it work? Well, reading the article linked at the top will give you those answers, but essentially it’s reading and writing to variables via a third party tray application. Then, when it wants to refresh the tweets it forces a reload of the ui, which reloads all the addon variables as well. However the idea that it’s exchanging data with the outside internet brings the EULA into question. Personally, I won’t be intsalling it (I’ve spent far too much time and money to risk it!) but I find the principle very interesting. There are, of course, other addons that exchange data with the outside. Things like dps trackers and the like. This is the first time I’ve seen a communication addon that works outside the game. xFire doesn’t really count, I don’t think, since it’s not really a direct client.

Food for thought, I think :)