I’m happy to announce that I’ve bludgeoned together a public Twitterbot for 140 | The Twitter Conference without touching a single line a code. This is particularly good news because the last time I touched a line of code there was a citywide blackout*.
The Twitter bot is here: 140tc.
140tc is also the official hashtag for the event, so if you’re tweeting about it, go ahead and stick #140tc on the end of your tweet.
How does the Twitter bot work? Basically, it will regurgitate any public reply you send containting “@140tc.”
Awesome. Now we can all send group messages.
Building the Bot
The bot works by pulling together Yahoo! Pipes, TwitterFeed, Twitter Search, and SocialToo.
It’s all outlined very nicely by Martin Ruiz on his blog, and I’d suggest just going through that tutorial if you want to set up your own.
The only confusing part was the Yahoo! Pipes integration, but I just pulled a feed from a Twitter Search for “@140tc” and plugged it into the Fetch Feed module…worked OK as far as I can tell.
What’s missing?
OK, so what are the downsides to hacking the bot together, instead of building a real one?
There are two big ones that I can think of:
- It only updates the 140 account every half-hour, because that’s as fast as twitterfeed goes.
- It won’t automatically put in your username, so you get no credit! (There’s an easy fix…put @yourusername at the end of your tweet!)
All in all, I’m pretty proud of myself.
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* This isn’t actually true. I do know my way around CSS pretty well, but putting together a Twitter bot is certainly beyond my expertise. ( Return )
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