The Idea
After I saw the huge success of @TamaleTracker I thought, we can't be the only people who could
benefit from a real time messaging service like this. Why not utilize what Twitter has provided for me, a common data
source more and more people are becoming familiar with, combined with this technology and make it available for anyone who wants to create their own
tamale tracker or other service to aggregate their followers content. So I created the Spotd service to do just that. It's a free generic retweet Twitter bot.
The Step-by-Step Process for Using the Service
- Users register a Twitter account with the Spotd service here.
- Twitter users send a @reply to the specified Twitter account when they want communicate something
- A scheduled listening service updates every five minutes and looks for any @replies that have come into the Twitter account and ReTweets them through itself
- Twitter users sign up to follow this Twitter account
- Users can recieve text alerts when the someone tweets to the Twitter account or simply look at Twitter acount page for updates
- Currently the retweet message is in this format [Your Twitter Bot] [Message] [Original Twitter Account] - TamaleTracker he just left lemmings ~ @djskinnyfat
Some uses that we thought would be cool:
- Creating a chat room atmosphere via Twitter
- Tourism, when you travel to a new city it would be cool to use ask and get information from locals
- Tamale Tracker type functionality for just about anything you want to track
- Celebrity sightings - much like the Gawker Stalker but this is in real time
- Media alerts
Do you see a need for the @spotd technology? It's easy - create a Twitter account, sign it up at the registration page, activate your account and you are all set.
The service updates every five minutes and only retweets replies/mentions that start with your user account name, ie @TamaleTracker [message].
Got something to say? Drop me a line
Email: clint.mcmahon at gmail dot com
Twitter: DJ SkinnyFat