Upload your personality to the cloud as a cyborg on Twitter!
When I started using Twitter, I noticed that I would find myself repeatedly typing in the same responses. For example, whenever someone would mention Cormac McCarthy, I would reply that The Road was one of my favorite books. I also noticed that I had trouble finding people to follow who shared my interests. Twitter makes a lot of suggestions, but those suggestions aren't very accurate. And when I finally did find some people to follow, I was inundated by tweets. Even among people whose content I really liked, only a small fraction of it was of interest to me. I started working on Happy Cyborg to address these issues.
Happy Cyborg is not a chat bot. It only responds to a tweet when it is certain that it can say something intelligent. You feed the cyborg text patterns and your associated responses. These responses are the repetitive things that you say over and over again. They begin conversations that you then manually take over. On the left, we see an example of the cyborg @kuwuakeda responding to one of my tweets.
To find people who share your interests, you feed the cyborg a set of phrases and numerical scores to indicate your preferences. The cyborg searches Twitter for people who use the phrases you scored positively and who avoid the phrases you scored negatively. It first searches for tweets that match your interests. When it finds such a tweet, the cyborg reads the profile description of the person, and if both the tweet and the description aling with your interests, it automatically follows that person.
Finding tweets that you are actually be interested in is a difficult technical problem. The solution I found was to feed the cyborg all of the tweets I have ever written. These tweets are then analyzed by an algorithm to create a probability model of my writing. The cyborg analyzes all of the tweets from everyone I follow, and it favorites any tweet that has a sufficiently high probability of having been written by me. I can then look at only the tweets that have been favorited. This works well. The method automatically favors tweets that are on topics in which I am interested and that are written in the style that I like--because it's close to my style!
The cyborg performs other tasks around the house such as unfollowing people who don't follow you back after five days, unless you specify that you really enjoy the person's tweets. It also adds anyone who interacts with you to a public list.
FAQ
- Can I create my own cyborg with my personality? Yes! Well, soon. I'm still polishing up the web interface. I expect it will be ready by September. Send me an email at jonathanwilliammugan@gmail.com, and I'll let you know when it's ready.
- Why is it a cyborg and not a bot? Two reasons. First, it doesn't think on its own. It only does what you would do. Second, it doesn't work on its own. You and the cyborg work together.
- Does it do automated DMs? No. I hate those things.
- Does the cyborg annoy people? No. It's not a bot; it works with you instead of replacing you as a Twitter user. It only responds to people who follow it, and it only does so when it is sure it can say what you would say. It begins conversations that you can take up and continue.
- What is your original twitter handle? @jmugan. If you follow me there, let me know that you came from here so I can make sure to follow you back.
- What language is Happy Cyborg written in? Python.