Bad santa!

I was looking at that the other day and it led me to wonder what apps are available that can auto-post on a delayed timer to twitter. Anyone know?

Idea is you queue up your posts for the week in advance, divided by day, and it posts them at random times during work hours on those days so that it looks like you are really active all the time.

Ooh! And then you could go out and commit crimes at the same time, and hava an alibi!

Answer: curl -u username:password -d status="your message here"

Wow, I didn't realize curl had so many cool options.

- d "Sends the specified data in a POST request  to  the  HTTP server, in a way that can emulate as if a user has filled in a HTML form and pressed the submit button."

Gosh, that is CONVENIENT. A new world awaits.

Instantly I am wondering about connecting a Turing Test passing Bot to a twitter. I know it's already been done (without checking, it's just obvious) but it would be fun to try.

There was also that guy whose bot was following a bunch of random people and he would post their tweets on his own account at random times. Made it seem like he was super interesting and the account got thousands of followers.

curl -u myname:secret -d status="Reading up on the history of curling, it's an obscure olympic sport." http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json

https://twitter.com/kowboykoder

Ta da.

UNFORTUNATELY it says "posting from API" right there, which is a dead giveaway it's a bot.

I need it to say "posting from web" or phone.

Oh look, most of loadedsanta's posts are from API.

Well there you go, I was right.

The question is, how do they tell what is via API and what is from a user? Did you pull down the normal web page first? Set Referrer correclty? I'm pretty sure it could all be done.

Yeah, clearly if I want to do 'from web' I need to emulate the web page and see what happens. Probably violates the TOS that way.

I do think that from API is useful for when automatically posting tweets of new article titles from your wordpress blog and such, so that it's clear it's automated.

But shouldn't be used for bots obviously, that defeats the whole purpose.

The should have a "bot" tag that says "from Web" when it's not.

Uh oh.

<input id="authenticity_token" name="authenticity_token" type="hidden" value="256 bit encrypted hexadecimal number">

authenticity_token is some ruby on rails thing, I wonder if that means twitter is ROR.

Hm.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/01/twitter-said-to-be-abandoning-ruby-on-rails/

http://twitter.com/ev/statuses/801530348

"FWIW: Twitter currently has no plans to abandon RoR. Lots of our code is not in RoR, already, though. Maybe that's why people are confused."

Blast from the past.

http://web.archive.org/web/20080102040259/http://www.zedshaw.com/rants/rails_is_a_ghetto.html

How to guide for auto web access to twitter.


http://www.bradino.com/php/screen-scraping-twitter/

It seems authenticity_token is an encryption of your user name and is a fixed value for a given account. So once you pull it you just need to send the right http headers, including the logged in cookie stuff.

http://twitter.com/lightbotqueue

I do this.  I have an java application that runs constantly and does exactly what you are talking about.

http://code.google.com/p/java-twitter/

http://botnodetoolkit.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/octaneserver/