GoBot

GoBot is a Twitter Bot based on the Twit library with a few very simple rules:

• Tweet 2 quotes each day from a list of quotes in a text file.
• Tweet back at any tweets mentioning my screen name with a few canned responses.
• At regular intervals (1hr), search for the most popular tweet and tweet-quote it, using a few simple canned expressions.

I have been utterly shocked at the relative success that this has produced. The Tweet impressions on my account have soared to over 30K per month. I’m not saying this couldn’t be better–the Bot is laughably simplistic at this point, often even using the same canned expression on sequential tweets since I didn’t bother to add too many alternatives in this version. Nonetheless, it appears to be getting a lot more views than I would have expected from such a simple bot. You can easily see this on the graph, since I am hitting my Heroku usage quota towards the end of each month, causing the bot to shut down temporarily and the impressions to go to zero. This is one of the things I plan to fix in the next version.