
Things That Tweet - Straubiz
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/07/things-that-tweet.html
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shorbaji
Reminds me of Paul Graham's observation:

"Twitter is important because it's a new protocol. Fundamentally it's a
messaging protocol where you don't specify the recipients. It's really more of
a discovery than an invention; that square was always there in the periodic
table of protocols, but no one had quite hit it squarely."

<http://ycombinator.com/rfs3.html>

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Symmetry
Its not really a new discovery, the very first instant messaging system was
half publish/subscribe: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zephyr_(protocol)>

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bfe
I'd like to see it go further, and see a machine pretending to be a person
tweeting, a Twitter version of the Turing test. Or you could go one better,
and apply machine learning to the social media output and other electronic
communications of a class of users, or a single user, and use it to create a
software personality that autonomously tweets, posts to G+ and Facebook,
texts, maybe even posts its own code and forks other users' code on github.
Then let human users see if they can tell software-based users from humans -
or from a particular person it's been programmed to emulate. Does anyone know
of anyone trying something like that yet?

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mgurlitz
Earlier this year there was a "Socialbot" project where bots controlled
Twitter accounts and were awarded points for follows and replies from humans.
The team that won (<http://aerofade.rk.net.nz/?p=152>) programmed the bot to
ask questions and use some Twitter culture (Follow Friday). There are also
quite a few funny conversations in the post.

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bfe
Ohmygod, a LOLCAT based Turing machine - many thanks for posting this reply.

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commanda
My favorite of these is <http://twitter.com/#!/big_ben_clock>, which tweets on
the hour in London. (I copied this idea and made @sf_o_clock). The idea of
devices broadcasting information to provide ambient data to anyone who cares
to listen is so fascinating. This could go way beyond the obvious things like
time, stocks and weather, and into... well, things I can't imagine yet.

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dodo53
off-topic: I have a perverse desire to put some microphones up, see if there's
any birdsong recognition software out there, and tweet whenever a bird in
range tweets :oP

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bfe
That's not perverse, it's a great idea. Ornithologists rely on crowdsourcing
to conduct bird population surveys and track changes in bird populations from
year to year. Let the volunteer surveyors sign up for twitter feeds for nearby
detection of less common birds to go and confirm.

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MicahWedemeyer
Pretty much everything that tweets in an automated fashion gets unfollowed by
me pretty quick. The twitter stream is cluttered enough as is, no need to make
it worse by having weather vanes and thermometers screaming alongside my
friends who see cute cats.

Maybe I'm missing the point, but I have yet to find a Twitter bot that
provides anything of real value.

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ohashi
I can see a few instances of automated tweeting generating value. I have a bot
that tweets the latest headlines from the most popular blogs in a small niche.
I'd say a large % of the active people in said niche follow the bot and it
gets a lot of retweets and sharing.

Twitter is another way to consume information. RSS aggregators are popular
which are automated, twitter can do the same thing over a medium people may be
more comfortable with.

I also see value of these without you following them in your stream. I may not
want to hear every weather update but when I want to know the weather, it
could be nice to know where I can find it updating in real-time in a place I
already am.

And to counter the inevitable 'but there is product/site/place X that already
does Y': so what? If you look at user behavior just because something exists
doesn't mean multiple competitors and ways to consume the same information
won't be popular or useful.

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MicahWedemeyer
I agree that it's unfair to say "so-and-so already does X", since innovating
often just takes the form of making something slightly less crappy than it was
before.

Unfortunately, my experience with Twitter, and especially automated Twitbots,
is that Twitter is the crappy experience that needs to be improved upon.
People push data into it because it's easy to do, not because it adds any real
value.

Let's take the weather example: Auto-tweeting weather vanes are too noisy to
include in your normal stream, so you unfollow them. Then, if you do want that
information you have to use a search client, or build some kind of special
client/consumer that compiles that info for you. At that point, surely it's
easier to use one of the other services. Getting the data out of Twitter in a
usable fashion is simply more work than getting it otherwise.

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Aqua_Geek
I agree with some of the commenters - this information is useful but _only_
when I need it. Being bombarded with the weather every 15 minutes is pointless
- I only need it when I'm about to head out for the day.

That being said, filtering all of this data via geofencing, time fencing, etc
would be awesome.

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bialecki
I've always thought there could be an interesting use for Twitter just as a
transport system for psuhing/pulling data between applications. You wouldn't
follow those accounts, they'd just be data feeds. It's definitely not the use
case Twitter started with, but it's viable now.

The advantage of using Twitter over another messaging system is that it's
public and open. Anyone can easily push or pull from it without you having to
build any additional infrastructure. On top of that it's reliable and can
handle a lot of data.

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Dysiode
I wonder about the honesty of machine sourced Tweets, not in the machines
themselves but in the fact it would be super easy for a human to duplicate the
tweets with faulty information. As a personal tool it could be amazingly
useful (plants tweeting when they need water) but I don't see it working so
well on a crowdsourced scale.

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jwco
Related to Apple's recent partnership with Twitter?

Methinks so.

