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Twitterbots
Pete Prodehl (@raster, rasterweb.net) helped me launch three Twitter bot websites recently: MKEfood.net, BookTweets.net and WineTweets.com
I got Pete to create the three twitterbots in the Fall of 2008. Basically anyone can follow the twitter account, then send it an "@reply" message and that message will bounce out to all the followers. Winetweets took off - the other two have sorta languished.
From the beginning I thought about the way to store, save and filter the @reply messages on website outside of Twitter. Twitter has a great search but even that search doesn't help you filter through a bunch of messages on a specific topic. Also, we all follow so many people and there are so many new people every day that the signal to noise ratio is getting worse and worse. That's where these kind of services come in handy.
We save all the messages and make them very searchable. You can type any words at the end of /search/ and filter through the messages for specific things. The best example is for "delicious" wines on Winetweets.com or Fun on BookTweets.
Some of the inspiration has come from Stocktwits. These guys are way ahead of people in creating a new way to search, find and discuss stocks & finance news. What they've done is very impressive and the stocktwits site has a great streaming "people ticker" that I enjoy watching just flow by. Eventually there will be a stocktwits for every subject.
Coming updates:
We're going to add a link out to Google (on mkefood), Amazon.com (on booktweets) and WineLibrary.com (on winetweets) for any word or phrase that is put within "quotes". We're also going to display any photos that are added to twitter via Twitpic. And I hope to have a simple search form (although right now you can do it yourself by adding words at the end of the search url).
Where is this going?
I'm not quitting my day job to work on these.
It's more about learning from doing. I am very intrigued by Twitter and its group publishing abilities. Twitter is the "ultimate user generated content" system. We all can cooperate and coordinate to publish a site together using Twitter. The only setback is that there are many "lurkers", people that read but don't participate. That needs to help.
I would like to make a community news Twitterbot service out of mkenews or/and milwaukeenews. I think it would be really amazing to have people regularly submit news that they see: fires, bar fights, high school sports scores, etc.
I have been thinking about a travel twitter bot assistant to help you plan a trip.
Also, I'm interested in Facebook's new friend connect. It would be great to open these bots up to Facebook and get Facebook-only people to participate, too.
