Last week I put together a little Twitterbot to feed the #gc20 tag. What I was trying to do with this bot was to provide a focused stream of information about the Government of Canada and Web 2.0.
I had noticed that @DBast had put together a feed on his blog, and thought — well, why not plunk that feed right into Twitter itself? So I created the @gc_20 account on Twitter, hopped over to TweetAlert, did what you are supposed to do there, and had the feed thrown together in a matter of a few minutes. I love living in the future.
Noticed afterwards that the TweetAlert service doesn’t operate in real-time, as there’s often a lag between the originating tweet and when it get’s retweeted by the @gc_20 account. There’s probably a way to reduce the lag by using a different set-up, but I do like how TweetAlert alters the tweet content slightly when it issues the retweet so that it doesn’t spam the search results or the original tweeter.
And why the hashtag #gc20? It’s been in common use for a while, and it’s specific to the Government of Canada as opposed to the more generic #gov20 hashtag. And shorter. I also like it because it’s bilingual.
So there you have it — my first experiment with a Twitterbot — so far. More tweaking to follow.
What's a spaghetti test?
Hey Peter – I set up a similar bot w/for the #cpsr hashtag (as you know) and am using tweetbots as well as a fairly complicated yahoo pipe to configure the RT’s w/attribution. It was quite a headache all in all.
The problem with the lag (at least in my case comes from the fact that tweetbots only checks the RSS feed once every hour. The check time is configurable but 1 hour seems to be the maximum, thus real time updates seems like a physical impossibility.
The other problem is that it will only retweet 3 tweets at a time so, if there was ever a flurry of activity on the hashtag only the 1st 3 tweets would end up being retweeted by the bot.
All in all not very satisfying.
Just thought I’d share =)
Hi Peter,
You’ll have to walk me through that over coffee, or something cold. Love, and appreciate what you’ve done. With the wealth and speed of info flowing around twitter, taking time to aggregate is a great service for the growing number of Gov’t of Canada public servants on Twitter.
Great work!! And thanks!
Martha
@mjmclean
Cool! Learnin’ new stuff all the time w/ your blog, thx Peter.
Nick – Thanks for sharing (or venting…)
MJ – sure anytime.
Anna – thanks!
[...] work. And to make a contingency plan. Neither of which I did. ‘Course I created this thing without much forethought either. It was just a little experiment in getting the hang of building a hashtag bot. Which is another [...]
[...] a ReTweeting Twitterbot used to be easy. My colleague Peter Smith originally pointed me towards Tweetalert, a service which scanned Twitter Search for the hashtag of your choice, then retweeted the [...]