Build A Bot

Tips, tools, and tricks for building twitter bots in python.

Examples of Bots

Bots I've built.

• @TreasuryIO is a bot that runs daily queries on data from treasury.io, formats the results in human-readable text, and publishes them to twitter. You can find the source code here or here

The US Gov has spent 248% more on postal service money orders than on Welfare this fiscal year - http://t.co/UeNKV20xYN

— TreasuryIO (@TreasuryIO) February 25, 2014

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• @YourRepsOnGuns follows a list of Representative on twitter and retweets any time a representative appears to be talking about guns or gun control.

I am extremely disheartened by the gun violence that gripped Chicago over the long holiday weekend. The stunning... http://t.co/otmwaZ3gkh

— Robin Kelly (@Robin42CD) July 8, 2013

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• @haikugrams polls the public twitter feed looking for accidental haikus. It then builds up a database of accidental haikus and looks for accidental haikus that are anagrams of eachother. (I never found one :/). It also posts the haikus to tumblr.

why does walmart have
the worse fucking check out lines
in the fucking world
http://t.co/k4ttOT2vbX

— haikugrams (@haikugrams) August 14, 2013

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Bots I wish I had built.

• @StopAndFrisk is tweeting all 685,724 stop-and-frisk incidents from 2011.

02/06/11: Police stop a 21-year-old in Brooklyn, citing "fits a relevant description." No weapon is found.

— Stop and Frisk (@stopandfrisk) February 27, 2014

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• @dronestream tweets every drone strike by the US, 2002 - 2014.

Jan 23, 2014: Driving along a road in Wadi Abeeda, 3-5 people were killed from above (Yemen) http://t.co/tte0UpMIDm http://t.co/bgrQgrurhd

— Dronestream (@dronestream) January 23, 2014

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• @_FloridaMan finds news stories with "Florida Man" in the headline.

Florida Man Runs Naked Through Neighborhood While High on Mushrooms; Says Biting People, However, is “Not My Thing” | http://t.co/i6OX3IMDtB

— Florida Man (@_FloridaMan) February 25, 2014

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• @Pentametron finds random tweets in iambic pentameter and then finds another line to form a couplet.

I've never had an Arizona tea.😭

— Dania:) (@dania_bear) February 28, 2014

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I took a picture with a fucking tree!!!

— ♡ (@5sos__NARRY) February 28, 2014

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• @anagramatron finds a random tweet and then attempts to find an anagram of that tweet.

What a world that we live in .

— TheyLoveYungin (@2yungdaja1) February 14, 2014

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whatever I'll do what I want

— SPEEDQUEEN (@cloveerr_) February 24, 2014

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• @everyunicode tweets every single character in the Unicode 6.2 standard.

㈪​

— everyunicode (@everyunicode) February 28, 2014

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• @StealthMountain alerts twitter users when they have typed "sneak peak" and they meant "sneak peek."

@BigBangCBS I think you mean "sneak peek"

— Stealth Mountain (@StealthMountain) January 9, 2014

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• @ProPubSunset is a bot consisting of a camera attached to a raspberry pi which detects sunsets and tweets a picture of them.

here's a test sunset pic.twitter.com/8xUI8NGByv

— ProPublica Sunset (@ProPubSunset) July 5, 2013

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Tools to build bots

• Iron Ebooks is a library written by Jake Harris to turn a user's feed into an Ebooks account.

More About Bots

• Tiny Subversions is an amazing person named Darius who churns out bots like @metaphorminute and @twoheadlines

• New York Review of Bots is exactly what it sounds like.