Twitter right, I guess I’m old because I cant think of when it would be useful for me. Not that I’ve really tried, I’m just tired of status updates on Facebook, Skype and whatnot. And 140 characters is at most lengthy enough for me to say a few swearwords.Much like Lars Ulrich, the drummer of Danish origin playing in Metallica.
I guess by now, dear readers, you are guessing as where to my social engineering prank is going.
That is correct, I’m gonna go program myself a Twitter-bot that twitters “fuck”,”FUCK”, fack”, “fock” etc etc at different times from screen name Lars Ulrich. While I thought this fun and all a year ago when I ran into the idea the first time It was not enough to actually do the thing. Then I read a book on how to market stuff via social media, yeah I know it’s out of character for me, and the writers was going on and on about twitter, and retweets and twitter searches.
This made me think about the old Lars Ulrich idea and how it could actually grow by itself. First of, if the twitter API let you do searches and re-tweets I could have that automated. And If I do that, ppl will start to know about the character and it might grow.
Step one was to look at the twitter API’s, easily enough they are just http requests and xml reponses and all the functions I think I might need are there.
Secondly I registered the users, he/it is here http://twitter.com/i_am_larsulrich, if you’re late in the game, the real person might have already registered his name 🙂
I’ve also found someone who has done a lot of the work I would need to do and more in the sourcecode from http://mattgemmell.com/2008/02/22/mgtwitterengine-twitter-from-cocoa.
So to recap, my program, should it be finished with the original specifications, should be able to:
Tweet different permutations of the word fuck.
Search for other ppl that tweets the word fuck.
Retweet tweets with the word fuck in them.
Answer to random persons fuck tweets.
I’m also aware that I might be thinking this more funny then Lars’s lawyers and Metallica fans, but they might just aswell think it’s more funny then me. I hope they do, and this will not be a permanent bot, just a little test I’ll use to see what happens.
Hope you will enjoy the ride with me!