Twitter Syntax for Twitter Bots
By Steve Poland • March 10, 2008
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 for it — although needs to be panned out likely. I’ve mentioned my thoughts on this topic in July 2007 as well.
I still hate the direct messaging syntax (i.e. “d mytrade AAPL GOOG AMZN”). I wish it’d be like “@mytrade AAPL GOOG AMZN” — and allow the twitter username account holder (i.e. “mytrade” in this case) to specify if their account is a ‘bot’, then that syntax would be a direct message (”command”) to that bot. If the user screws up and does like “@mytrade1 AAPL GOOG AMZN” which isn’t designated as a bot, then it gives an error to the user and doesn’t post to their twitter account.
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I find the direct messaging syntax clunky too and wonder about using something like:
!username or =username