Disruptive Telephony

Wouldn't it be great if you could integrate Skype's mood messages with Twitter? So that whatever you entered in Skype could show up in Twitter?

It turns out that you can in the new Skype 2.8 Beta for Mac OS X... with a little file editing.

NOTE: This appears to be an experimental feature added by a Skype developer... and as I note at the bottom, it has some bugs.

Here's what you need to do:

1. On your Mac, using either the Finder or the command-line, whichever you prefer, go to the directory/folder /Users/yourmacusername/Library/Application Support/Skype/yourskypeusername. (For example, my directory is /Users/dyork/Library/Application Support/Skype/danyork)

2. With some text editor, open the file config.xml.

3. Toward the end of the file, you will see a section of XML about <UI> and inside of that a subsection <General>. In that General section, add these two lines:

 <TwitterPassword>yourpassword</TwitterPassword>
 <TwitterUsername>yourusername</TwitterUsername>

Here's an abbreviated version of what it looked like in my file:

  <UI>
    ...
    <General>
      <LastSkypeVersionUsed>2.8.0.309</LastSkypeVersionUsed>
      <SmsShowNumber>0</SmsShowNumber>
      <TwitterPassword>yourpassword</TwitterPassword>
      <TwitterUsername>yourusername</TwitterUsername>
    </General>
    <Profile>
      <LastOnlineStatus>2</LastOnlineStatus>
    </Profile>
  </UI>

4. Restart Skype.

Ta da... now anything you type in your Mood Message Chat or regular Mood Message window will show up in Twitter.

Now I found out about this when I sent some feedback to Skype about my initial use of the 2.8 Beta and said "I already have enough places to update status - why can't this be linked to, say, Twitter?" The email response mentioned this hack of the config file. I have no idea whether this feature will be improved in some future version (and perhaps supported) or if it will be removed... or simply remain as a hack for those who want to go through the work.

A MAJOR CAVEAT - It does, though, seem to have at least one major bug. If those of you following my Twitter stream wondered why I had tweets coming out that were simply something like "Define", here's why...

the Skype-to-Twitter integration seems to chop what is sent to Twitter after a single or double-quote

So setting my Skype mood message to:

Define "VoIP" - and then we can talk about it's death!

wound up simply being this in Twitter:

Define

Similarly, mood messages I have entered with apostrophes (such as "Here's a link to .... ") wind up only sending the part before the apostrophe. It would appear to pretty obviously be a bug in how this code is written. Maybe they'll fix that. Maybe they won't.

Still, if you can avoid apostrophes and quotes, it does provide a nice way for Skype mood messages to go to Twitter. Obviously this means that Skype is where you originate your Twitter messages (or at least some of them... the ones that you update in your Mood Messages).

Going the other way and allowing Twitter messages to update your Skype mood message would also be great... but that's not this particular feature.

And there you have it... have fun with it!

P.S. Sorry, Windows and Linux Skype users, this appears to be another Mac-only feature...

---

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either subscribing to the RSS feed or following me on Twitter or identi.ca.

---

Technorati Tags: skype, twitter, mac, macosx