Behold! The Gary Glitter Twitter Bot

30th December 2010

It’s alive…

I was bored over the festive season, so I decided to do some PHP coding and make something useful. But then I made the Gary Glitter Twitter bot instead. This all got started because I had a bout of insomnia last week and tweeted, “I am bored.” Half an hour later, I noticed that I had been retweeted by some “Bored Bot.” This then got me thinking about what kind of bot I would make if I had the chance.

There are no fixed criteria for what constitutes a decent Twitter bot (indeed, some of you may be thinking there is no such thing as a decent Twitter bot), but often, they are silly, irreverent, and completely unforseen—and generally, they are triggered when users unknowingly tweet a specific keyword or perform a certain action.

I toyed with a few ideas at first, but the only thing I could think of was a catchy name: The Gary Glitter Twitter Bot! So, having set the bar low as a starting point, I worked backwards to construct my bot…

Please note: At this juncture, I feel that I should state my intentions. Gary Glitter is a monster, and I want to make it clear that I do not condone his vile crimes. The Gary Glitter Twitter Bot was developed to pour scorn on this vile character, rather than glorify him or justify his actions. The response from Twitter users has been positive so far and I hope that it continues to raise an unexpected smile, rather than cause offence (laughter is cathartic after all). I am not a nonce, and I do not run paedofile rings.

How it works:

I saved a Twitter search for “Gary Glitter” and pulled the results into a PHP-generated page on my server. This URL was then used with Yahoo Pipes to create an RSS feed. I then used the Twitter feed to post it to the @garyglitterbot Twitter account.

Every half hour, it auto-searches for “Gary Glitter” tweets and copies them (five at a time). It then retweets the results one by one, linking back to the original source, and adds a Gary Glitter song lyric for good measure.

As with most bots, it’s ridiculous and completely pointless (some might say annoying), but it’s my contribution to the world, and I’m very proud.