Why Twitterbot?

Using Python to Twitterbot

Esther Seyffarth
PyUnconf, September 2015

it me

Contact me:
@ojahnn on Twitter
esther.seyffarth@gmail.com

Best Twitterbot ever

Why many people achieve very little despite spending most of their time

Tweet source:
@horse_ebooks status

September 24, 2013

Horse_ebooks Is Human After All
i am disappoint
thousands of tears later

There's a whole twitterbotting community out there!

My first twitterbots

Kein Preiskartell ohne Eiskarte

Tweet source:
@ParsExToto status
Additional credit: @noeddl

My first twitterbots

Brustknochen sind tabuloser als Assistenzroboter

Tweet source:
@VergleichBot status

The Python of it

  • I use tweepy to connect to Twitter.
  • I have some favourite corpora that I like to use as data sources. Find some useful tips (German slides) here, starting from p. 22.
  • The code for most of my bots is on my GitHub profile.
  • Let's have a look at @OMG_Wikipedia...

So... why twitterbot?

  • Twitterbots are a nice little exercise for text generation tasks.
  • There's only room for 140 characters, but that's enough space to be creative!
  • They make me laugh, because even though I know exactly how they work, they still sometimes post unexpected/weird messages.
  • Social twitterbotting: I gave a workshop on Twitterbots at the University of Düsseldorf, read about it here (German).

Wow! I wanna twitterbot right away!

  • You can use my tutorial (German)!
  • Don't forget to tell me about your work, so I can add your bot to my list of favourites.

Thank you for your attention!

Harry Potter und die Baustellenlogistik der Denkpsychologie

Tweet source:
@best_of_HP status