Hello Taylor, > What's your bot all about?
The bot is a character bot for a popular Japanese doujin (not commercially backed, a person makes the game in their spare time and usually sells them at conventions) game. Such bots are highly concentrated throughout the Japanese community, as the writing system they have can say a lot more in 140 characters than with English characters (one word can constitute 2 characters for example). Basically such bots are conversational AI bots. Given certain cues they respond in a certain way. Such responses are sometimes randomized to provide a more dynamic interaction to users. With my current twitter bot, I'm currently working on an AI based system to constitute unsupervised learning and responses based on how the user interacts with the bot. However, because of the status updates imposed, and lack of knowledge on the specific rates, I have to consider how a normal person would operate, and include events such as "going to sleep" and "heading out for a bit". If certain interactions require a larger number of status updates, I planned to have it as a kind of web app that users could continue their conversation with the character, making my worries more about the data storage requirements in the database than status update limits. Other bot creators, however, may not have such elaborate setups due to hosting costs. For them, it's important to be able to scale their both with a large number of followers by being able to throttle status updates as per the twitter requirements. These bot creators wish to stay within the guidelines that twitter provides, but armed only with the knowledge of but the daily limit and receiving HTTP error codes, there is nothing to go off of. On the point of how such bots contribute to the twitter community, because the bot acts as the character itself, it draws fans of the characters into a tighter knit community. Users can look at the bot's follower list and find users with more similiar and focused interests with ease. Such bots will usually produce random non-reply based tweets with the character's lines, giving a topic of discussion for the bot's followers. There are even some users that go so far as to follow nothing but their favorite character's bots. Best Regards, Chris White -- Subscription settings: http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/subscribe?hl=en
