lessons learned from the Twitter/Identi.ca bot development

First to admit it: I didn’t really dig into the underlying issues of Twitter or Identi.ca. However, while I developed that Twitter and Identi.ca bot framework, I came across some, I feel worth sharing:

Identi.ca looks like being on a good way. Their goal is to be a Twitter alternative. So they implement the Twitter API.

During the bot framework development, I ran into some nasty issues at Identi.ca: Every message of everyone you follow got into your personal inbox. — On Twitter, if you want to see the mails only directed at you, you can do so and ignore what’s going on in your followees’ streams. Here, on Identi.ca, you couldn’t. Just everything your followees wrote went to your inbox. The filter was broken.

Even worse, the message was tagged as a reply to you and to particularly you, stated by some bit of data of the message in question. That, at some point stopped.

When I had to look at Identi.ca replies lately, it was mostly fixed. Back then, only messages that happened to have ‘@yourname’ in them got into your inbox, and that tag reply to particularly you vanished, if I remember correctly. I had to deal with that when I set up detecting new messages and responding to them.

Another issue was that my bot’s messages were flagged as replies to it. I fixed that by finally pattern matching the head of every message with ‘@botname’. However, as things notably sorted out already during the few days of I developed against Identi.ca made a good impression on me of how hurriedly its maintainers are working to get everything straight and smooth. Looks good.
 

On the other hand, Twitter interfered with testing the bot framework. Quite regularly I ran into the issue that Twitter blacklisted my IP just after one test suite ran. The first one came through, the second failed. Looked like random failure, and took me a while to realize it was really nothing on my side nor any fail whale thing on the other end, but deliberate punishment issued at me. — Getting a new IP address usually sorts out that sort of thing.

I’ve got my doubts whether uch interfering helps Twitter to gain folks who love to build stuff — services, businesses — atop of Twitter. Instead, I think it would be rather useful if both micro-blogging services, Twitter and Identi.ca would offer bot testing accounts and support developers there. That way either (or both) of them could become a real platform [for businesses offering services atop of Twitter/Identi.ca]. Plus, I see a chance for them to cash in: Just charge service bots who cause above-average traffic. That would leave air to breathe for bot services maturing while fully-fledged services would pay.