Twitter may be the hottest thing in social media, but so far very few companies in the video game world have been able to figure out what, exactly, to do with the popular micro-blogging service. Do you add it to your console? Do you make your game support it? Ignore it entirely? So far, the first few attempts to leverage the power of Twitter to spread the word about games have ended rather poorly. First, the strange case of Uncharted 2.

We've shut it off

Uncharted 2 was created with a feature Naughty Dog seemed rather excited about: the game would tweet your progress in the game automatically. That meant that your friends would know what you were playing, and how far along you were. It seemed like a good idea, until review copies were sent to the gaming press.

Soon, if you followed the industry, the entirety of some Twitter feeds consisted of messages about their progress in the game. This created something of a backlash, as other gaming writers—which may have included this one—took to tweeting about their progress in random boardgames. A consensus seemed to be reached that allowing a game to take over your Twitter account was a bad thing. Naughty Dog noticed the negative publicity, and very quickly pulled the plug on the feature.

"We obviously want to provide the best experience for everybody, so for the time being we've disabled Twitter updates on chapter completions," Evan Wells, the co-president of Naughty Dog, said on the PlayStation Blog. "The option will still exist in the menus when the game ships on 10/13, but if activated, it will do nothing. Some time after the game has shipped, we'll release a patch to reactivate the feature, but with a limit on the frequency of updates.

"We're certainly sorry for any inconvenience, but I guess that's the risk you run when trying to blaze a new trail in the complicated world of Social Media!"

Companies love it when you tweet positive comments about their games, but automated messages? It may be awhile before anyone else tries it, and when the Twitter update for the Xbox 360 goes live, we'll see how many gamers think turning on automated tweets is a good idea.

Is it possible to do it well?

"Since Twitter is so new and changing so rapidly, everyone is still learning how best to use the service," Sam Houston told us. Houston is the community manager for GamerDNA, a site dedicated to creating and fostering communities around the gaming world. He knows a little something about how to track (and create) buzz. "There is a bit of a learning curve and I think everyone is still learning what the best practices are, and what works and doesn't work."

GamerDNA tracks who is tweeting about what games, and uses that to create a picture of what's hot in the gaming world; the Tweet My Gaming site almost looks like a stock ticker for gaming buzz. The big games at the moment? World of WarCraft, Halo 3: ODST, and Aion, among others.

What have they found users want from Twitter? Infrequent tweets, and a lack of automation. "The service is also innately personal, since a Twitter user is 'following' someone's personal Twitter stream in most cases," he explained. "Because of this, you naturally expect personal tweets from that users...not exactly automated tweets."

At GamerDNA, many users send out one automated tweet a day summarizing their gaming habits. It's a balancing act to allow users to share their information easily, without being obnoxious about it. "It's impossible to make everyone happy," Houston says. "But we try our hardest to provide a great service while respecting everyone's preferences."

Everyone's getting in on the action

Twitter is being used heavily in the gaming world, although missteps are frequent. EA ran into issues with its Twitter-based competition built around Dante's Inferno, and the negative buzz around that issue led to the #EAFail meme and a conversation about whether bad PR can be good for business. On the flip side, Microsoft's Major Nelson gives out free game codes to Xbox Live Arcade games on Twitter frequently, and big announcements are often made on Twitter before they hit the gaming blogs and news sites.

The trouble comes when companies try to make what's by nature an informal and limited communication device work as a marketing tool. Do people want to know what their friends are playing? Surely. Do they need to know every time a level or milestone is passed in a game? Certainly not.