This post is long overdue, so I apologize for the delay. A couple weeks ago we launched a little something we’ve dubbed the twitterbot. Our reasons for launching it made sense (I’ll get to this in a minute), but we didn’t quite realize how well it would work, let alone how much attention it would get from our community.
To answer the titular question, twitterbot is a simple bot that scours Twitter in search of links to stories being discussed on Current.com. When it finds matches, it posts those tweets on the related story on Current.com.
Here’s an example: China made headlines recently when they blocked social network sites like Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube. They even went as far as blocking Hotmail and MSN’s new Bing search engine.
However, when the story first hit Current.com the only site that was knowingly blocked was Twitter, so singrrr titled her submission: “China blocks Twitter ahead of Tiananmen Anniversary.”
People tweeted the Huffington Post story the singrrr had posted on Current.com, while the story continued to unfold about YouTube, Flickr, and other sites being blocked. Twitterbot made a connection between tweets including the Huffington Post story and singrrr’s Current.com post, and began attaching tweets to the discussion section on Current.com.
We realized that the story had actually expanded to include other services, so we updated the title to include more information.
Why launch twitterbot?
While the case outlined above is an example of twitterbot working well, we actually had another reason for launching this. We are extremely interested in the ability to create items on CDC using tweets. We created twitterbot as a means to test this idea out, while also being able to pull in potentially interesting commentary from Twitter.
What have we learned?
Well, it works. However, there are some kinks we recognize that need fixing. First of all, having twitterbot tweets appear in our discussion space is an odd experience, so we are working through some layout changes that should hopefully help separate the two in a much more meaningful way.
Also, the twitterbot was a little too aggressive when we first launched, so we’ve made some tweaks to the filtering patterns. For example, we’ve throttled the number of twitterbot posts allowed on an individual story, and we’ve also eliminated tweets that include a Current.com URL in them.
DeliaTheArtist helped us out with that one, as every time she tweeted a Current.com submission, her tweet would be the first comment to appear on the Current.com story page via twitterbot. Obviously less than ideal, and now the twitterbot should know better.
We’ll continue to tweak and enhance our twitterbot, and as I mentioned this is the first step to something much bigger involving integration with Twitter on Current.com. So, if you have feedback or suggestions, please let us know on Get Satisfaction!
Ed. Note: The Twitterbot story continues, and it involves unplugging…take a look.
June 6th, 2009 at 1:25 pm
I am quite certain that there have been several Twitterbots created just for me. The @effbot, maybe even the @Swear_Bot that just popped up a few days ago. And don’t forget about the lovable #Twensored Duck who hijacked my entire feed for hours on end.
I don’t know when the effbot was created (of course I am writing while the Twitter is down so I have no way of checking) but about three weeks ago I woke to find a whole bunch of tweets with the hashtag #EFF. At first I assumed that it was just a polite way of sneaking in the word “fuck” into a tweet.
At first the effbot only picked up tweets that used “eff” in sequence. For example, “I am so eff’n late for work,” or “Twitter really needs to fix the eff’n problem with @replies.”
After posting this question to the Twitter for several days the effbot evolved and adopted own little #EFF tag and took it for himself..
No more Early Follow Friday or #EFFs for you, because yes, I do believe I am being followed by a Bot.
June 23rd, 2009 at 3:06 pm
Please dissolve all connections with Twitter, Current, you were really cool and informed without them, and using them won’t catapult you any higher because there is no higher place. All Twitter can do is pull you down to the dark side and then members will have to fight it out in a post-apocalyptic war of good versus evil. With Twitter twits everywhere, good has troublesome odds.
July 6th, 2009 at 3:10 pm
So with all this bad feedback on Twitterbot are you still going to keep running it? Because that’s just bad policy, BAD. THE THING SUCKS. The posts don’t make sense. Shouldn’t you be promoting the usage of proper grammar in conversation. Twitterbot makes me feel like IDIOCRACY is right around the corner. I don’t think I’ll stick around much longer if I keep seeing unintelligent tweets on every article. A lot of “tweets” BARF, just repeat the title and say WOW, or WTF. What the Fuck man? Kill the bot, isn’t it apparent that 98% of us HATE HATE HATE it. RAWR!