My first foray into creating a twitterbot is FinallyBot. A bot that scours restless tech sites for news that has finally happened.
@TechCrunch: Indiegogo Updates Its Logo And Redesigns Website, Finally Optimized For Mobile And Tablets http://t.co/14nVmzdqHn
— FinallyBot (@FinallyBot) April 8, 2014
The Verge: Microsoft is finally catching up to the future http://t.co/1RISJcwpdL
— FinallyBot (@FinallyBot) April 7, 2014
It tracks RSS feeds for about 120 technology sites. If it finds a news story with “finally” in the title, it generates a short link with bit.ly (using BitlyPHP), and tweets it (using Twitter for PHP)
It’s been quietly running for about 8½ months now and has over 1700 tweets. That’s about 200 news items with “finally” in the title per month.
The most impatient site? Averaging about one finally news item every other day, the honor goes to Gizmodo with 142 “finally” tweets in the past 36 weeks.
| Site | Tweets (past 36 weeks) |
|---|---|
| Gizmodo | 142 |
| Boy Genius Report | 107 |
| VentureBeat | 77 |
| Business Insider | 68 |
| Android Police | 66 |
| Engadget | 57 |
| The Next Web | 51 |
| The Verge | 50 |
| Quartz | 50 |
| Techcrunch | 49 |