Service Profile: mketweeps
Goal: I came up with an idea that I wanted to find local people in our area and mention them using a twitter bot. Pretty simple.
Two requirements were they either had to use the word milwaukee in their profile or be from the milwaukee location, and they had to not have a blank profile. The tweet contained a shout out to their name and as much of their profile as could be fit in the tweet.
Technology used:
Zend framework command line cron job. Once an hour it ran. Pretty simple using the Zend Framework OAuth stuff. (Originally I was using the first version of the API to twitter - so I used standard HTTP requests).
Lessons learned:
- Stay current when APIs change. I ignored the oAuth change at twitter and had a bot that was not functioning for a long time.
- Follow the people you mention. Very little people followed the bot even though they were mentioned.
- Lots of replies … ok so that isn’t such a ‘lessons learned’ but a “what should I have done about that”
- Monetization. What if I had grown a large collection of followers. Now what?
- Personal account: I should have followed people that replied to the bot. I generally ignored all the tweets even. Pay more attention!
Screenshots
