Develop your own Twitter bot? — Don’t.

It’s tempting. The Twitter API looks reasonable simple, and there are libraries out there that would maintain all the basic I/O stuff. All left to be done, that’s what it looks like, is the pure bot functionality. A snap. Made my efforts to find re-usable bots slacken. Build a Twitter bot just upon a lib? Why not? A challenge for my mind.

But — don’t.

Once I was done with what I was after, I started collecting references on Twitter bots, got feedback. — There are plenty of them, in several languages: PHP, ASP, Ruby, Perl. And it looks like: mostly based on the next best Twitter I/O handling lib.
 

When I was half-way through my project I realized: If there would be a the framework around where interested parties could contribute to, and which everyone could use to build their flavor of bot atop of that, people could focus on what their bot’s about to deliver instead of crouching around the low-level roots, scratching Twitter API stuff.

For that reason, I refocussed my own project to develop the initial framework in Ruby that allows indeed that: get off the basic stuff, concentrate on your bot’s deliverables, make it become the perfect service. — That’s what I realize a Twitter bot to be: a service. To the extend that you could do business through it. But certainly not if you clip and lop and linger with the fundamentals.

Therefore, if you’ve got anything to contribute and want to — please do.

Everyone else: If you know somebody who’s about to develop their own bot, safe them from the unnecessary efforts. To point out this here place to them would be just great!

Thanks for your support!