How to Get an RSS Feed for your XBOX 360 Gamertag

My geek want of the day is getting an RSS feed of my Xbox 360 game activity so that I can use it with lifestreaming services. For once I’m not the only person who feels this need. There’s at least two of us! :)

I’m not sure why Microsoft doesn’t make an RSS feed of your Xbox Live activity available. The information is all there, they publish it as a gamercard. But they don’t give you access to the raw data to do with as you please unless you’re a member of the Xbox Community Developers Program. Here are the various ways you can access your Xbox 360 Gamercard to use with other websites.

Method 1: Embed Gamercard as an Image

By far the easiest way to display your Xbox 360 info is by using a Gamercard image. You can embed the image or flash in your web site and it’ll display in real time. There’s also a WordPress plugin that uses a slightly hacky method of using regular expressions on the official Xbox gamercard.

Method 2: Facebook App

Xbox 360 Live Gamercard is a Facebook app that will give you all the info right on your page.

…will show you what games you play along with your Gamerscore and achievements for each game. A few times a day, your Gamercard will be updated and your new achievements published to the news feed for all of your friends to marvel at through our use of exclusive Xbox Live APIs. See who your friends are on Xbox Live and there is also a leaderboard. Enjoy.

It works for Xbox 360, Games for Windows and Live Anywhere. Your profile will show your latest games, how many achievements you have got in each, and you can compare games with your friends.

Here’s an example of Modern Life Is Rubbish‘s gamertag:

There are other FB apps that do the same thing like Xbox Live Express.

Method 3: Broadcast your Xbox 360 Status to Twitter

Duncan MacKenzie has written a Windows app for broadcasting your Xbox activity to Twitter. You install it on your computer, put in your Xbox gamertag and Twitter username/password and it’ll update Twitter with your Xbox activity.

Method 4: SOAP/REST APIs!

Duncan earns huge geek points in my book for putting up SOAP/REST APIs to the Xbox gamertag info. This is what Microsoft should have made available and in my books it underlines everything that’s wrong the M$.

He explains where he gets the information from:

It is not from scraping and it is not from any publicly available source. I joined the Xbox Community Developer Program (XCDP), which is an official program designed to support folks who are building community sites (forums, reviews, blogs, etc…) around Xbox related topics.

Many folks who want Xbox info, are not working on a large site like the people in the XCDP, which is exactly why I created my service. This way, people who are building a small tool or script, most likely to be used by a small number of folks, can have access to some well formed and easy to use data.

What if you would qualify for the XCDP? Well, at the moment I don’t have any direct link for you, but I’ll ask around to see if I can find a link or a contact for anyone may qualify and would like to sign up….

Method 5: Yahoo Pipe RSS Feed

Because Duncan was awesome enough to provide a REST API for the Xbox 360, I was able to create some pipes for converting that information to an RSS feed. You can use it with lifestreaming apps like Friend Feed until they get access to the developer program and are able to officially support the Xbox 360.

The RSS feed includes your gamerscore and achivements in the description, as well as a thumbnail of the game. The links point to your Xbox.com Live profile so people can compare games with you.

I’ve put together two different pipes

1. Displays your Gamertag in the feed title, and links to your Xbox.com Live profile
2. Does not display your Gamertag and does not link to your Xbox.com Live profile (more private)

Click on the link you want, enter your gamertag and run the pipe. Then click on More options and Get as RSS.