First Twitter Bots Launched: Sports Teams, Weather, Stock Quotes
By Steve Poland • April 4, 2007
These might be the first push/pull Twitter applications.
For weather forecasts, add Forecast as a Twitter friend. Simply send it a direct message with your zip code, or city name, or city / state — for example ‘d forecast buffalo, ny’ or ‘d forecast 14217′. You will then receive a direct message back with your forecast.
For stock quotes, add Stock as a Twitter friend. Simply send it a direct message with the stock symbol — for example ‘d stock goog’. You will then receive a direct message back with the stock quote. Update: I updated this post, previously it said the username was Stocks — that was incorrect.
As for sports, you can add any of the following — each one publicly pushes score updates during a game for that selected team. Also, you can direct message any of the bots with a sport team to get a score for that team. For example, you could be a friend of Bulls and want to know the score of the Sabres hockey game — simply send the following then: ‘d bulls sabres’ and you’ll receive a direct message back with the Sabres score.
Future to come: Pushing you local sports teams news.
Note for Sports: These aren’t auto-adding you as a friend yet, thus, you can add them as a friend and get sports scores pushed to you — but you can’t direct message them yet. This will be working soon.
Note: Both the Stocks and Forecast will auto-add you as their friend within 1 minute after you add them as a friend. The one problem with Twitter and the creation of these bots is that if you direct message someone that hasn’t made you their friend, then they don’t receive your direct message. But Twitter makes you have to have someone as a friend before you can even attempt direct messaging them, so that is good, because once you are alerted of that with an error message back to your phone (to add the username), then we add you as our friend. If you direct message via the web interface though, I don’t think it gives you an error — it’s a Twitter bug.
Related posts:
- How to create a Twitter bot Determine what your bot will do. Capabilities include the ability to push information publicly to everyone (i.e. a sports team bot might push the current score of a game after each new point scored;...
- “Pull” Twitter Apps Not Practical Until… “Pull” Twitter apps aren’t very practical until a setting is added to each user account. Right now, if someone adds me as a friend — I still can’t receive any direct messages they send me,...
- I’m the first Twitter spammer, ugh There’s a lot of things I am, but this wasn’t one of them that I expected to become — particularly given my love for the Twitter service. But things are fine with the Twitter team...
- Twitter Syntax for Twitter Bots Fred Wilson just featured a twitter bot for stock quotes. I was also just chatting with Andrew Parker (Fred’s associate) at USV about Twitter syntax. I think we came up with a pretty good idea...
- Twitter - What Will Dominate: Content Push or Content Pull? I don’t know what will blow up and be used more on Twitter — content push plays, or pull plays. Push would be having ‘NFL’ as a friend and getting all the latest NFL news...
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Are these people setting up websites to promote their bots, or are they just relying that people will stumble across them and figure out how to use them?
I’d like to see how many people start using them
I think the weather bot is already overloaded I did a d forecast 32073, and it told me city not found, use d forecast zipcode.
I guess it didn’t find the zipcode?
response time is abysmal, but that may be Twitter’s fault.
it seems only US cities are in the list. I am from Mumbai India and that’s not on the list yet. So I will wait till that gets added. Any plans?
Hey! I added Forecast as a friend earlier tonight, and for the last seven hours I have gotten 2 emails A MINUTE from Twitter telling me that Forecast has added me as a friend. I submitted a bug report to Twitter before I followed the URL and found this post. Just thought I’d let you know, as well, just in case it is a bug on your side.
Wow! now that’s what I can ’squitting’ usernames!
Great work!
what I ‘call’… not can..
interesting use btw, of the dm api. This way the bot can reveal and display all its friends on its page. Previous method bots are really quite lonely (no mates) but still popular (followed)
Something fell down? All I’m getting are error messages. If I use a zipcode, nada. If I d forecast hi I get nada. I’ve tried different zipcodes, nada. d forecast London, England, error message.
?
Yo, we are on the same page.
http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/CA6431687.html
I Like the name and banner of this blog…nice one!
It looks like Forecast has been spidering everyone’s social network on Twitter, adding them as friends. Shouldn’t there be a better way to enable communication than adding over 7,000 spurious “friends”? This doesn’t seem very scalable. Why not ask for a feature to allow direct messages even from people who aren’t your friends?
I’d like to point out, as well, that according to numerous people (thank you twittersearch), I am not the only one getting 2 emails a minute from Forecast adding us. Mine is still going. 24 hours now of 2 emails a minute. It’s kind of insane. There are at least 10 other people who have twittered that they are suffering from this.
Does this also work for Germany?
In regard to Brad’s comment, I had to remove the bots from my profile after receiving about 80+ “add” emails.
Nice selection of squitted names
I checked this out; followed instuctions to get forecast, nothing. No messages, no direct messages, no twitters.
Twitter is fine for a distraction, but not if your life gets tied up in it.
WTF happened to these things. Doesn’t look like any of them have updated in 3 weeks or so. What gives?
Thanks, Steve. Your articles on Twitter bots are great, and were an inspiration for me to create my own: timer.
Timer lets you set reminders for yourself using Twitter’s direct message functionality.
http://twitter.com/timer
In addition, I setup a website that helps people learn about new Twitter bots, including the ones you mention above:
http://retweet.com
i’d love to know which web service/product you are using to power your weather bot. Need a weather service for a web project that can handle some decent traffic and has pretty good response time
Hello,
I don’t think the Forecast bot is working. I added Forecast as someone I wanted to follow. But, I did not get a return follow, and could not do a direct message and use the bot.
John
The Reds have not been updated in a year.. I guess the bots are down.
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hey dude,
great bots. I’ve got winetweets and booktweets
Working on archive sites for all.
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