Update on the Twitter Auto Post Bot’s Progress

If you will allow my musing, I launched a couple killer new features to my Twitter Bot the other day that I’d like to pat myself on the back about.

My Twitter Bot now retweets other Twitter accounts posts!

Wow Terri, that’s revolutionary (NOT!) you say?

Well here’s some other details about why I think it’s pretty awesome:

• It pulls tweets from a curated (private) Twitter list of relevant and semi-relevant accounts
• It grabs the most recent (40 or so) post and gives them each a rating based on criteria like:
  • Is there a link? [+]
  • Have others retweeted it? [+++]
  • Are specific keywords in the tweet? [+]
  • Does it use hash tags [+], and if it does see if it uses TOO many (too many #tags = spam IMHO) [-]

With me yet? Awesome.

There was also an existing feature that automatically followed other Twitter accounts if their Twitter accounts were detected in the content of the 3rd party API I pull data from. Now it now only follows them but also adds them to a “staging list” or the curated list mentioned above, but only if their recent tweets prove relevant enough to qualify them.

A couple other tid-bits of information about the Twitter bot:

• I get about 10x more @mentions than my personal account and more RT’s (which adds more @ mentions thanks to the system that thanks the RT’ers)
• It hasn’t been blocked as spam thanks to the system performing self-checks to ensure duplicate content isn’t constantly posted (usually a lag of 3-7 days between repeats) well and cause I don’t spam people with annoying @ mentions

Also: I hadn’t touched it for more than a month and a half (yes I got lazy about REAL posting) and during that time it was performing beautifully & carrying on simple conversations with it’s followers. Granted the simple conversations included my “random post” asking my followers a general conversational question and them responding or the account posting some other automated tweet, another account RTing that, my bot thanking them and them responding to the thank you.

If you don’t think that’s cool and wish you had access to my GIT repo we may not be friends anymore.

If there are specific parts that I’ve described that you’d like me to go into coding detail about please let me know in the comments; I would love to go into detail but don’t have the time to explain ALL of it so request away ladies & gents!

Tagged as: bot, twitter

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