Two Twitter Bots

My Twitter feed includes real humans, and also some bots. Some of my favorites are @hamilbots, @yayfrens, @softlandscapes, and @generativebot.

I’ve worked at Twitter for about a year and I hadn’t written a bot before! So I gave it a try, and wrote @BingoBits and @DailyOblo.

Cheap Bots Done Quick

Cheap Bots Done Quick is a really neat site that makes it almost trivial to write your first Twitter bot.

Bots are written in Tracery, a generative grammar specified as a JSON string. Here’s an example bot:

{
    "origin": ["this could be a tweet", "this is #alternatives# tweet"],
    "alternatives": ["an example", "a different"]
}

See? Pretty simple! No worries about hosting, logic, etc…

@DailyOblo

SET-inspired bot that tweets a game board once a day.

(oblo means “group of things” in Esperanto, aka a SET.)

I generated the SVGs, as well as the Tracery formatting, with some super-hacky Python code. Source is at cheapbotsdonequick.com/source/dailyoblo.

@BingoBits

Scrabble bot that tweets part of a 7- or 8- letter bingo once a day. (i.e. it’ll tweet 6 letters of a 7 letter word, or 7 letters of an 8 letter word.) Word lists from the Seattle Scrabble Club.

This required basically no programming, just a bit of awk to extract the words from the files above. Source is at cheapbotsdonequick.com/source/BingoBits.

My favorite part of this one is that I’m actually engaging with it! I’ve been trying to memorize more bingos lately - and get better at spotting potential ones - so having them randomly scattered through my Twitter feed is pretty great.

TLDR; CheapBotsDoneQuick is cool

Cheap Bots Done Quick makes it super-easy to write a Twitter bot! If you haven’t tried it yet, you should!

Next I should figure out how to actually host my own. ;)

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