ObliqueTweet, my first twitterbot
Monday 14 April 2008 at 7:32 pm. Used tags: api, fun, mashup, twitter, twitterapi
Warning, little educational content ahead, this is a holiday post.
I've been messing around a wee bit with the twitter api, twitter tester, Tweets to TeachMeetPerth and twitter presenter, the last in response to Ewan's tweet: Can one present by Twit?.
None of these are what could be called polished jobs even given my limitations but the TwitterApi Documentation is pretty straightforward.
I have also created a few of rss twitter bots the most useful of which is ScotEduBlogs which tweets the blogs post title as they arrive on ScotEduBlogs this uses the twitterfeed.com : feed your blog to twitter - post RSS to twitter automatically I think.
So it seems time for my first twitterbot ObliqueTweet, tweet anything @ObliqueTweet and it will reply with a random Oblique Strategy (currently the 4th edition).
The Oblique Strategies are a set of cards devised by Brian Eno and artist Peter Schmidt to solve (artistic) problems by drawing a card randomly. There is a lot of information at The Oblique Strategies. There have been a number of computer programs to show Strategies at random, web and download versions. (I even made a supercard project back in 2002). There is a nice php version, minimal design | Oblique Strategies, which you can download.
The ObliqueTweet twitterbot, just grabs the most recent @ replies to ObliqueTweet and then grabs a random Oblique Strategies and sends it back as a reply.
The script is automatically run using http://www.webbasedcron.com once every minute.
I am wondering now if I can think of a useful twitterbot, any ideas?
four comments
Not terribly useful but it’d be a fun addition to an ARG, especially with the ability to randomize replies.
I wonder if you could have it respond in a particular way based on some keywords in the initiating tweet. That’d open up a whole new level of fun. It’d be better for ARGs and you could do odd things like choose your own adventure scenarios.
Like I said, maybe not terribly useful but at least amusing.
Tom
Tom (Email) (URL) - 14-04-’08 20:36Loving your ObliqueTweet – it seems to know me so well when it advised me not to break the silence :o)
Lisa (URL) - 14-04-’08 20:47Lisa xx
um perhaps not very useful but you could perhaps ask the bot real questions and it to give you real answers although google already does this.
how about if a lesson went belly up you could tweet “help” to the bot and it could give u a totally random activity for the kids to do? could be risky but fun!
krysia (Email) (URL) - 14-04-’08 20:51Tom, I guess you could parse whatever the question was, I was thinking of letting users choose editions of the strategies. A more complex version could be a sort of ELIZA
Lisa, some advice is best ignored
Krysia, the dice man for kids, I would like it if I was not a teacher
A colleague used to have a box of task cards for children who finished there work, if my class could twitter I guess that would be easy.
John (Email) (URL) - 14-04-’08 23:52