A VC - Latest Comments in Anatomy Of A Twitter Bot

Re: Anatomy Of A Twitter Bot

Nuno Rodrigues — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 07:39:08 -0000

If you want to take a look on a bot which provides the scores for the main football (soccer) competitions, check http://twitter.com/twitscores

Re: Anatomy Of A Twitter Bot

whitneymcn — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 10:28:55 -0000

Other that the minor structural difference that the LOTD-style doesn't require that the repost account follow people before they can post, looks like they're doing the same thing.

Re: Anatomy Of A Twitter Bot

Sebastian Keil — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 04:53:49 -0000

Mmh, I don't really see the difference to something Alan Joyce wrote last year (http://www.everythingdigita... and which we (or truth be told, I) am using to power the @fatblogging account.http://twitter.com/fatblogging
Or is there a difference?

Re: Anatomy Of A Twitter Bot

jackson — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 21:39:50 -0000

"Waiting on this line at Shake Shack I'm reminded of the Saxon song 'And the Band Played on'."

"Just before dawn in the cold light
We came out of the night
A great expectation from the man who ran the show
Will it rain, will it snow, will it shine, we don't know
Are there clouds up in the sky

See the people, feel the power
There was sixty thousand there
Just like thunder the crowds began to roar
Where you there, did ya know, did ya see all the show
There was magic in the air"

or something like that....

Re: Anatomy Of A Twitter Bot

jeckman — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 11:39:16 -0000

I've written a similar app in PHP, though relying on the hashtag instead - #lotd or #shakeshack instead or @.

This also means the items get picked up at twemes.com/tag and other places #hashtags are used.

You can get it (called ReTweeter) at:
http://www.openparenthesis....

Re: Anatomy Of A Twitter Bot

Prashant Sachdev — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 21:25:47 -0000

twitter is great! simple and easy to use application make things a success.

i like the applications people are creating around twitter. i would like to have twitter app as private tool to discuss the daily work inside company. email / forums / blog / wiki are not the perfect solution for this....but twitter like app would be great.

do let me know if you know of any such thing.

Re: Anatomy Of A Twitter Bot

RacerRick — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 16:22:35 -0000

We made a 'twitter bot' for Milwaukee area food recommendations. It's www.twitter.com/mkefood. We're going to make a few more, like nycfood, etc.

Fyi, I tried to get the Twitterfeed.com guy to build a service and he says he's got no time because of his day job. This should be his day job!

Re: Anatomy Of A Twitter Bot

whitneymcn — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 15:55:22 -0000

Excellent -- I obviously haven't spent enough time with the API docs. :) Thanks, mccv.

Re: Anatomy Of A Twitter Bot

Greg Cohn — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 15:48:51 -0000

there are a bunch of ways to do this, but "retweet @username replies" would be such an easy option for twitter to integrate. as would "tweet #tagspace" or "tweet RSS feed".

Re: Anatomy Of A Twitter Bot

Andy Gadiel — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 14:17:45 -0000

Thanks Fred, the @nojf group is now live for New Orleans JazzFest fun:

http://www.twitter.com/nojf

Re: Anatomy Of A Twitter Bot

ali — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 12:01:52 -0000

another interesting twitter news
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TEC...

Re: Anatomy Of A Twitter Bot

mccv — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 10:41:45 -0000

@whitneymcn - small clarification on the Twitter API calls/day limit. Post operations (which I assume means direct messages) don't count against the limit. It's entirely feasible to build largeish scale applications using just the HTTP interface, but they're not going to be realtime. By the time you add autofollowing you're probably down to a 5 minute refresh cycle.

Re: Anatomy Of A Twitter Bot

whitneymcn — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 09:49:32 -0000

Thanks for the link, Fred.

Funny little coincidence: the LOTD lyric you picked is from one of the people working on a Twitter bot. Attila is going to do a movie quote version, I believe.

@joelaz grouptweet.com is the closest thing that I've seen to the sort of bot creation site you're talking about -- it's the same idea as LOTD except that the communication happens through Twitter direct messages rather than @replies, so it's private rather than public group communication. I expect that you're right and more such services will be popping up before long.

I also kind of expect to see Twitter building similar tools at some point, since the ~1,500 API calls/day limit means that third parties can't do group tools that scale very well. Any large group or tool that uses direct messages will burn through those API calls pretty quick. Interesting possibility for Twitter, actually: people can build their own groups using the API, or pay a monthly and use Twitter-native group tools so that (a) no coding is required, and (b) the group can scale since you're not API rate limited.

Re: Anatomy Of A Twitter Bot

howardlindzon — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 02:24:29 -0000

man do I see this is a boon for stock guys once again and for promoters to move penny stocks. think flash mobs to thinly traded stocks.

Re: Anatomy Of A Twitter Bot

Srini Kumar — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 21:04:21 -0000

This is just about the most intelligent comment on Twitter I have ever read. Someone out there really understands twitter in the VC community, I am happy and amazed. This is going to be a massive set of businesses - almost like an open-source listserv. I wonder if Twitter has some juicy account names set up in reserve for itself... it could be like a domain-name spree... and what company wouldn't want this kind of access to its fans? (other than bad companies of course)

You might like us too (metanotes.com) :)

Re: Anatomy Of A Twitter Bot

mccv — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 21:03:48 -0000

I actually used code posted here http://dominiek.com/article... to add more real time support to one of our apps. The pros: it uses the Jabber interface so you can handle tweets realtime. The downside: as we found out this week, the stability of Twitter's Jabber interface isn't exactly the same as its HTTP interface... and unlike the Perl example, if your service or Twitter's service is down you don't get things queued up, they just poof.

Re: Anatomy Of A Twitter Bot

charlie crystle — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 20:53:22 -0000

It was cool to see the kid who was arrested in Egypt use Twitter to alert his friends--and his subsequent release. http://latimesblogs.latimes...

Re: Anatomy Of A Twitter Bot

joshua schachter — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 18:40:33 -0000

This wouldn't require code if the twitter "track" code let you track strings containing symbols (eg @lotd etc)

Re: Anatomy Of A Twitter Bot

Joe Lazarus — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 18:32:25 -0000

Someone should make a service that creates and manages Twitter bots through a simple web site. I'm sort of surprised it doesn't already exist... then again, maybe it does and I just don't know about it. TwitterFeed is pretty close.