A Little Fun with the Twitter Bots

9 Dec

My Twitter account has been public for about one month.  During this time, I’ve seen several of my tweets retweeted by accounts unknown to me.  After looking at the Twitter profiles, I figured out that these were automatic retweets based on a word or phase in the original message.  A few weeks ago I was slightly offended by the account @condolences as it retweets anything with the word “condolences”.  I also noticed one that retweets anything with “haiku” in it whether or not the text of said tweet is an actual haiku.  Last night I discovered one that retweets anything that includes the word “elephant”.

So I decided to have some fun and trigger these three accounts at the same time.  My challenge was to figure out a way to include “condolences“, “haiku” and “elephant” in one tweet.  I came up with this:

Within a few minutes I got the following:

A short time after I received this:

A just a bit later I received the following.

It was good for a quick laugh but I still wonder what purpose these particular automatic retweeter accounts serve.  There are others which have clear purposes like the one associated with magpie.  They seem to be Twitter spam.  I guess I just spammed the spammers.

(Note: I might have caused an infinite loop situation as well as I just received another retweet from @condolences.  And another from @haikutwaiku.  Oops!)

Related Posts:

  • http://twitter.com/kenya/statuses/1093920365 kenya (kenya m)

    fun article – A Little Fun with the Twitter Bots http://tinyurl.com/8l8xml

  • http://twitter.com/kenya/statuses/1093913866 kenya (kenya m)
  • http://serenitylife.vox.com SerenityLife

    There was a #haiku tag that is being used a lot last month and it was flooding my twitter stream with re-tweets like the one that you did here. I un-followed a few people because of that because I thought they were aware of their actions.

    Despite them not knowing there is always some type of aggregator that is going to repeat your information on twitter or even on the web. It can be funny in the beginning but after awhile you get a little annoyed with it. This is what I consider twitter spam. That is why I had to let a few people go because I felt these individuals were trying to annoy me. (Typical – some people like to do this to me? I don’t know why!)

    What is interesting is that I have seen a lot of repeats of tweets when it comes to sharing information about “thanking God.”

    See here http://twitter.com/thankgod

    I was surprised when someone had said to me Thank God and then I saw their @ reply to me then I saw a repeat of the same tweet here:

    http://twitter.com/thankgod/statuses/1029510736

    and this was the original one

    http://twitter.com/VisionSphere/statuses/1029510174

    So I guess some people are trying to scan our tweets for certain phrases? Hmm..well, it won’t work on the private Twitter Accounts like mine! 8)
    Thank you for sharing!

    SerenityLifes last blog post..Being too attentive online may drain you..

  • http://serenitylife.vox.com SerenityLife

    There was a #haiku tag that is being used a lot last month and it was flooding my twitter stream with re-tweets like the one that you did here. I un-followed a few people because of that because I thought they were aware of their actions.

    Despite them not knowing there is always some type of aggregator that is going to repeat your information on twitter or even on the web. It can be funny in the beginning but after awhile you get a little annoyed with it. This is what I consider twitter spam. That is why I had to let a few people go because I felt these individuals were trying to annoy me. (Typical – some people like to do this to me? I don’t know why!)

    What is interesting is that I have seen a lot of repeats of tweets when it comes to sharing information about “thanking God.”

    See here http://twitter.com/thankgod

    I was surprised when someone had said to me Thank God and then I saw their @ reply to me then I saw a repeat of the same tweet here:

    http://twitter.com/thankgod/statuses/1029510736

    and this was the original one

    http://twitter.com/VisionSphere/statuses/1029510174

    So I guess some people are trying to scan our tweets for certain phrases? Hmm..well, it won’t work on the private Twitter Accounts like mine! 8)

    Thank you for sharing!

    SerenityLifes last blog post..Being too attentive online may drain you..

  • kenya

    I tried again with the following phrase “Obama should offer condolences to the elephant magpie haiku (and the bots that love them).” in an attempt to elicit 5 bots but only got participation from 4 of them.

    Here are the results via Twitter Search.

  • kenya

    I tried again with the following phrase “Obama should offer condolences to the elephant magpie haiku (and the bots that love them).” in an attempt to elicit 5 bots but only got participation from 4 of them.

    Here are the results via Twitter Search.