Internet Wish: Twitter Bot
November 30, 2008
I would love it if someone would write a TwitterBot service. It would:
- Allow you to give it the Username and Password of a given Twitter Account (let’s say JSKitSupport)
- Auto-follow people when they followed it
- Auto-unfollow people when they unfollow it
- Allow you to register one or more ‘Bot Owners’ (Both Twitter account and Email Address)
- Forward any @replies or references to given keywords to Bot Owners
- Allow bot owners to direct message it and have it relay those messages to its followers (perhaps optionally auto-append the Owner’s twitter name to the end of the message)
- Allows Bot Owners to direct message it commands
- One of those commands could be ‘d tag last’ which ques up the last @reply in some sort of ‘follow up’ queue for the bot owners.
Can you think of any other features? Add them in comments and if I like them I will append them here!
November 30, 2008 at 2:35 am
I’ve heard of a service called SocialToo, but I’ve never tried it. Basically, it can auto-follow new followers, and auto-unfollow those who unfollow you. I think it also does a few other nifty things.
It would be super cool to have a bot with all of the other features as well, though!
November 30, 2008 at 2:56 am
Oh very cool!
This is a good starting place – are they responsive and developing the service out?
November 30, 2008 at 1:17 pm
How abour being able to schedule tweets.. so sometimes I have a bunch of interesting thoughts, which I’d like to automatically release during the day, so I’m not ’spamming’ people.
November 30, 2008 at 11:04 pm
I’m not too sure whether SocialToo is under active/ongoing development or not… I just heard of it when I followed someone who uses it, sorry!
November 30, 2008 at 11:09 pm
http://tweetlater.com can schedule tweets (as per the name !!) but it can also keep track of followers for you, and auto follow them back.
I’m a little busy right now, but contact me on twitter ( http://twitter.com/martin_english ) and I’ll see what I can do
My last twitter bot was http://twitter.com/magic_8_ball
December 1, 2008 at 7:26 am
You can schedule tweets with TwitterMail.com but not many people use that feature…
December 3, 2008 at 7:52 pm
check out this Twitter 411 service: http://t411.linkstore.ru
it your own information system (e.g. bot) on the top of Twitter
December 23, 2008 at 4:02 pm
i’ve been using twuffer to schedule tweets…it seems to have a lot of great features. http://twuffer.com
December 27, 2008 at 11:57 am
Call me a contrarian (and I fully understand the intent of all these bot tasks) but allow me to offer a different point of view that, to me renders their use troublesome. Twitter has come to be one of my most value added tools/platforms. I give it credit partially because of some of th tips I learned early on and I maintain those early disciplines. 1. Everything I do on Twitter is manual. I kinda loathe any bot generated actions. I don’t need you to tell me how glad you are I followed you. It lacks sincerity. I’d rather hear nothing. I don’t necessarily mind an auto-follow but the message comes across as fake and I don’t need it. In fact, it often has a reverse effect. It makes me want to unfollow sometimes. 2. I don’t need to hear you tell me you’ll Tweet me later. Just Tweet me later. I get it. I know you might no be around when I @ you or follow you. The bot doesn’t need to tell me too.
By manually analyzing each Twitterer I follow and those that follwo me, I have been able to build a massively custom and useful stream of value added Twitterers. Anything bot related generally gets an unfollow (if it detracts from the experience)
December 27, 2008 at 2:09 pm
If you notice, though, my bot does none of those automated actions.
It’s main job is to facilitate 1 twitter account managed by multiple individuals.
Most, if not all responses from the blog to followers are as a result of direct action on behalf of a human.
February 12, 2009 at 7:38 am
I just released some tool written in Ruby that allows to easily build Twitter and Identi.ca bots atop of it.
Here’s my summary: http://dagobart.wordpress.com/2009/02/10/chatbots-for-twitteridentica-a-mini-framework-in-ruby/ Via click-through you eventually will get to its sourceforge page where it’s hosted.
I hope it’s simple enough so you can adapt it to your needs.
Best,
dagobart