long overdue closing

So, as class work got more busy, the inevitable happened: I stopped writing about it. So what happened?

Well, after cutting teeth on getting our Bieber bot going, the real project began. It is described in more detail here but the idea was each group in the class would create a twitter bot persona that was based in Boston and gain followers. The goal in the end was to try to create a trending topic by all tweeting about fictitious banksy artwork appearing on Boston monuments.

Were we successful? Kind of. Our bot ‘Olli’ got a Klout score of 48 and the story was mentioned in at least one Boston paper.

Was is a fun and unique way to learn about social networks, APIs, machine learning and lots of other cool stuff? Definitely. This was, without a doubt, the most fun course I have ever taken.

got ourselves a crying talking sleeping walking living doll…soon

As group work starts in earnest, I have relinquished sole ownership of the bot and the team and I will meet on Sunday to come up with some strategies together for future bot activity. To teamwork!

In our last lecture we started on some nltk which I have come into to contact with before and is an excellent module with a fantastic book that is freely available online in its entirety (I love computer science). The aim of the lecture was to use some nltk tricks to get our bot chatting. I had been doing this already by retweeting some bieber tweets (beits? biebeets?) but now we’re going to be stealing some tweets from the twitterverse and rebranding them as our own also which will be fun. We’re going to do some simple sentiment analysis to make sure we are not saying anything really horrible. For now, it will be relatively simple, something with a sentiment keyword list like this. yoink.

We are not in the top 7 list by follower count (although I am personally and we may bot my account just to get moving on this end of things too) but we’re doing alright. High scoring members of the class presented how they had gotten so many followers and the lead team in fact seemed to have done everything manually and with tools they got online. There are no rules for the followers competition but that smells like cheating to me. Their strategy has been to post photos of bieber and it is going well.

So until next time:

The numbers

 

sunday night fever

Spent the afternoon writing up a report of daily activity for class. I haven’t really been keeping track of things in a systematic way so will do some recoding and only run code at same times of day each day.

I have updated how I choose who to follow based on assignment guidelines (which I didn’t really read before ). Now I’m only following users with between 50 and 200 followers and only once a day. I’m also retweeting bieber’s latest 10 statuses at different intervals.

The numbers:

slow and steady

My follower count is not increasing as fast as I would like. I’m following about 100 new bieber fans each day but less than half follow back. I’m wondering if its because the account looks fake. I’ve tried upping my post count with a script that tweets a bieber song lyric every 5 mins. 1 was favourited by a follower and 1 was retweeted. Will try something more sophisticated tomorrow.

The numbers:

I will follow…

Day two, got suspended last night! I guess following 100 users off the bat is too aggressive, gonna tone it down to 40. Decided to try and make the persona a more normal looking guy, picture below:

Today’s activity was unfollowing those who hadn’t followed me back from last night and following 30 more bieber fans at random. Going to look into being more selective about who I follow. Tweeted with trending #throwbackthursday and a photo to see if I can get any exposure from that. Also followed the bot from my personal account and favourited that tweet. After dealing with the suspension, stats are as follows:   we’re just getting started…

update after first night’s basic tinkering

I looked into different strategies to implement along the way to get more followers but for now I just followed a hundred beliebers and will see what happens. Incidentally, I got 6 followers before I did this, I presume from following bieber and not because my tweets are so awesome. But there you have it.

the beginning

First goal is get as many Justin Bieber followers as possible. Just did the basic set up of the account: bieber photos, a few tweets and followed the man himself. How I feel right now:

Followers: 0    Following: 1    Tweets: 3