The other day, I decided to finish up a twitter hack idea I had and never fully executed. Awhile ago I made a bot that output the updates of my friends into my IRC channel. I did this by writing a quick bot that would log into a dedicated AIM account which received updates from the twitter service. Then the bot would output these updates to my IRC channel. This was neat. It worked OK. the bot kept crashing though – I think because I didn’t make it threaded so the aim connectivity was dependent on activity in the channel – or maybe the other way around. Well whichever reason – it wasn’t that great of a hack.

So the other day I was sitting in IRC but I wasn’t paying attention. Someone wanted to ask me a question – and I didn’t respond. So they kept asking and asking and asking. Until finally I went back in and saw that I was needed. I thought about this on the walk home and decided I needed to make a bot that allowed people to send twitter updates. Then I could follow my IRC channel and get updates when people wanted me on. I then thought how funny it would be to have the bot update on topic change as well.

So I whipped up a quick twitter IRC Bot. You can check out the source on the amazing Google project hosting system.

Please visit the Twitter IRC Bot project page, or download/view the Perl source.

I will probably update the project to include a supybot plugin that will do the same thing. Just so we don’t have to clutter up an IRC channel with 1000 bots.

Btw, I think its funny that twitter is blowing up right now. Everyone is blogging about twitter and people are finally starting to get it. A lot of other people are hating it. I think its hilarious. I love it. I think its really nifty to have a mini blog of all my friends updates. My mom likes it – cuz she then can see what my brother and I are doing on her treo. I think its neat. But then again – it has to do with how you use it and integrate it. It isn’t a blog replacer and I think it is as intrusive as you allow it to be.