- Image via Wikipedia
During the last year Teknograd have created several Twitter bots to test different concepts. In this post I will try to make a overview of what’s out there.
1. SMS
In Sweden and Norway Twitter don’t send out SMS on mentions. We monitor selected users and send SMS to them when they are mentioned.
2. Automatic reply
We monitor different brand names and when mentioned our bot react and reply with one of several predefined sentences. Our thought was that this would be a first line of interaction between brands and people on Twitter. See 7 and you understand the power this could give brands.
3. Store my tweet
We all know that tweets tend to disappear over time. With this bot we monitor words, users or any other type of Twitter searches and store them at our own data center. Example of things we monitor: #gladkund, #surkund and #viarettpar.
4. TweetKarma
Give karma to people on Twitter. TweetKarma.Nu monitors #tweetkarma and #movershakermonday and add karma points to people and present who has the most karma on TweetKarma.Nu.
5. Get current weather
We monitor the tags #varmt, #kallt and #kaldt (hot and cold in Swedish and Norwegian) in connection with city name mentioned after the tag. For example “#varmt i Stockholm” or “#kallt Oslo”. We do a look up of the city and see if we can find the current weather and reply with a tweet.
6. Want to know who is king of Norway?
Send a tweet with the hashtag #undrar followed by a question and our bot will do its best to find the correct answer for you. Try for example: #undrar Who is the king of Norway?
7. Geotagged questions
Twitter don’t want to give us information on how many users have enabled geotagging. Seems to be under 10% but we are unsure. Anyway you get loads of power with geotagged tweets so enable it! In Sweden you can search for #Systembolaget or #sprit and our bot will find the closest place selling beer, wine and hard liquor. Can be very useful in a country where selling liquor is state controlled. We also monitor #surdeg which will give you the closest sour doe bakery. We see a huge market for geo based bots. Think if you could get the nearest petrol station, vegetarian restaurant or hospital by simply asking for it in a tweet!
The geotagged bot data can be linked to WordPress. Our bot will query WordPress for geolocation which means you only need to store geoinformation in one place.
8. Discussion – 140 char limit bot
In a couple of tweets you have engaged loads of people into a discussion you started. You try to include them all just to find that for each person you add the number of characters you can use for keeping the discussion alive gets fewer and fewer. If you see this happen you can send a tweet with the hashtag #diskutera (to discuss in Swedish) and our bot will reply with a unique hashtag which you can share with the people in the current discussion and thereby add the number of available characters.
Original idea for this bot came from @bjornfiner.
We do have other bots and monitor other words but I believe the above pretty much sums up the main areas we have looked into and are able to publish at this point.
If you have any thoughts or ideas on Twitter bots please get in touch!
