The Bot is (Still) Alive

A week ago, Twitter announced that it would stop allowing free access to its API, and begin charging for use.

This meant that an incredible number of creative projects (twitter bots in particular) would simply stop working. Unless their creators coughed up money for access to the API.

Yours truly has/had a few Twitter bot projects over the years. My longest running one has been @theDesireBot, which posts about twice an hour (it finds a random tweet with the phrase “I want…” and pairs it with a random photo).

I was curious if the bot was still working, or if the API shutoff had taken effect. So I went to go check.

Things are still working, it would seem.

Funny thought: I’m manually checking an automated bot, as a kind of electronic “canary in a coal mine” for Twitter (a service whose icon is a bird).

I’ve actually been revisiting my other project (@VillanelleBot). I had to switch to a paid tier over at Heroku, and I noticed a while back that my bot had died.

I’ve taken on a refactor of it, and was getting close to posting. But I’ve been dragging my feet. And when I heard news of the Twitter API shutting down, I kind of lost my momentum figuring “Well, why bother?”

I should probably just post it, and bring @VillanelleBot back online. Even if it’s only for a few weeks.

Related:
Timely Tweets
Desire Bot: A Twitter Bot That Re-Posts What the World Wants