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.




Related posts:

  1. First Twitter Bots Launched: Sports Teams, Weather, Stock Quotes 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 —...
  2. 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;...
  3. “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,...
  4. IM Bots: (Almost) Real-Time Blog Chat via IM This post got me thinking about how you could integrate IM into blogs. Currently, if people communicate about a topic/post, they post a comment. Almost in real-time, others can be alerted of the new comments...
  5. 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...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Comments

One Response to “Twitter Syntax for Twitter Bots”

  1. MyAvatars 0.2 Andy Davies on March 26th, 2008 6:20 am (perm link)

    I find the direct messaging syntax clunky too and wonder about using something like:

    !username or =username

Got something to say?





*
To prove you're a person (not a spam script), type the security word shown in the picture. Click on the picture to hear an audio file of the word.
Click to hear an audio file of the anti-spam word