fun with python-twitter

Sometimes, coding is serious business.

And, sometimes, coding is not serious business at all.

I've done a little bit of playing around with Twitter in the past. Last year, I wrote a simple twitter client bash script, so I could update my status from the command line. I've gotten some work done on a twitter bot that actually tries to fool people into thinking it is human. I haven't put it online yet, since I need to finish writing the content that implies that this bot is up to interesting things during different parts of different days.

However, this morning, Rob T Firefly gave me the idea to take that silly Kanye West internet meme and turn it into a Twitter bot. Right now it polls the public timeline every thirty seconds, and searches for tweets that say "thanks" or "thank you." If it finds any such tweets, it responds to the writer of the tweet and tells them that it is happy for them and will let them finish, but that whoever tweeted just before them in the public timeline had one of the best tweets of all time. I am also adding functionality that spits back a random Kanye West quote from a list if anyone @ replies to the bot.

The code is still a work in progress, but the latest version of it is up on my projects page. I'm quite pleased that it has been running on Twitter for about ten hours so far, and the account has not yet been deleted for being a spam bot.