"...the definition of a bot seems quite arbitrary, where do we call an application or a string of actions or scripts a 'bot', and where or when do we call it something else? Is the only reason for calling a scripted set of actions a bot, the fact that the script takes the role (and maybe the place) of a human being as a form of artificial intelligence, like they do for instance on wikipedia, in chatrooms, twitter or spamming us through mail (do they really set out to maximize their chances of success? - which is what often AI delineates)?
And what about the new generations of Twitter web scutter that does not seem to be intelligible in any human-sense kind of way, but do follow scripts and try to maximize something (followers, tweets)?" Bookmarked if only for use of the phrase "web scutter".

An excellent selection of auto-response bots.

"Sycorax is a Twitter client, written in Python, that choreographs the online behavior of fictional characters. Other tweet schedulers make your personal Twitter stream look like a clockwork robot is behind it, posting tweets at the optimal time for penetration into your social network. Syxorax lets fictional characters use Twitter the way real people do. Your characters can post at odd hours and talk to each other, taking their lines from a simple script you write, but without any ongoing work from you." Very nice.

"Bootstrap is a toolkit from Twitter designed to kickstart development of webapps and sites. It includes base CSS and HTML for typography, forms, buttons, tables, grids, navigation, and more." Really nice - straightforward, elegant, and a good starting point for the scratchy websites I tend to end up making.

"I’d really like more week-long exercises in fiction delivered to me via Twitter. The problem with other accounts for fictional characters – including, say, The West Wing’s Joshua Lyman and Donna Moss – is that they’re continuous, shapeless roleplay. I want a planned narrative that ends."

"Data combined with narrative creates personality. It can be used to construct a larger and richer history around a subject.

The world is already divided in to two camps: People who are going to watch the Super Ball and those who aren't. This is an opportunity to delight the former and reach the latter, by providing a larger and more playful cast of characters to describe the events during the game." Nice!

Bot that buys dirt-cheap goods on TradeMe and tells Twitter what it's buying/bidding on. Seems we need a Rule 38: if software is described in an XKCD comic, the chance of it being brought into reality approaches 1 as t approahces infinity.

The talk I gave at the Media Festival Arts is now online. It's about making data human-scale, and why Twitter bots are a kind of synecdoche.

Straightforward guide to making bots work with OAuth.

Lovely: roleplaying Ferris Bueller not only on Twitter, but also on Foursquare. I love that Foursquare has a policy to allow "fake check-ins but not to reward them points"; there's lots of potential there, both playful and storyful.

Collecting casual and informal collective-nouns by scraping twitter. The "What Is This" page is very well done, explaining just what the scraper "sees" in a clear fashion. Fun.

"All the characters fom Home Alone, the project starts on the 22nd." 22 Twitterbots, performing Home Alone, in realtime, starting Dec 22nd. Awesome. Bonkers, but awesome (and takes the concept I used in Twit 4 Dead to a new level).

"...we’re still in talking-dog territory here, where the fact of socialness matters more than the outcome. This won’t last forever, of course. It probably won’t last out 2010." Tom is sharing some notes from that "140 Characters" conference; he's got some sharp insight/ideas.

"Grackle68k is a twitter client for early Macintoshes running System 6 through OS9."

Hmn. Visualisation of tweets about the word "FIFA" (do the maths there) and all games played of FIFA 10 - so you can see both which teams are doing well, and which countries have good FIFA gamers in them. There's little bits of stats-fluff, but it doesn't go nearly deep enough. It's lovely EA are doing this... but it could be, you know, useful, rather than just shiny? Bungie's statistics crown is still a long way off.

"Critical thinking is the key to success!" Professor Layton is on Twitter. Officially. This is good.

"The Tower of London tweets every time it opens and shuts..." Nice sub-editing, Daily Mail!

"Even the platform holders are excited about the potential for social networking to tie into games. At E3, Microsoft proudly announced integration of Facebook, music network Last.fm and Twitter with Xbox Live. The latter pair are fairly irrelevant, admittedly. Last.fm is solely a music service, while Twitter isn't actually a social network at all - it's a one-to-many broadcast system, which isn't quite the same thing." Oh. But that's where you're wrong, Rob. Sorry.

"BREADBOX64 is a twitter client for the C64/128 which allows you to tweet from a real C64 and show your friends timeline." Now that's a classy look.

"I thoroughly enjoy the more real time nature of these diary fragments popping up among my friends’ updates. It’s easy to picture @samuelpepys conducting his business and pleasure, travelling around London — from his home near the Tower of London to Deptford to Westminster — when he’s updating you on his progress during the day." Phil on the joy of small updates from things that aren't (quite) people.

"I imagine this is how everybody who responds to the idea of Twitter with “Who cares if you’re eating a sandwich?” envisions Twitter." Yes.

Mapping where people are leaving and arriving based on nothing more than what they said on Twitter. Pretty, and perhaps the beginnings of something quite useful.

"Now that suburban housewives in Missouri are letting their thoughts be known via Twitter, it's as if writing itself is thought to be under attack, invaded from all sides by the unwashed masses whose thoughts have not been sanctioned as Literature™. In many ways, I'm reminded of Truman Capote's infamous put-down of Jack Kerouac: "That's not writing, it's typing.""

"Daily deep-dive analysis of a specimen from the modern world's most exciting communication medium for penis humor."

Kevan is publishing parts of Diary of a Nobody on Twitter. Makes sense, really.

"Which I think meant they were telling me they'd be happy if I pretended to follow them but then used technology to ignore them in favour of other people. What? So not only would they rather I pretended to follow them they wanted to explain to me how this dishonest artifice could easily be achieved." Dave Gorman on a kind of pretend-following, usage patterns of Twitter, and keeping tools useful for yourself (amongst other stuff; this is very good).

"...I never thought I’d be banned from something for liking it in the wrong way. It’s interesting to discover completely different attitudes to these new ways of interacting online." Yes, I find this a lot; my actions and behaviours are shaped in a particular way, to the point that I've found myself recently (in the case of Twitter) recommending a totally opposite manner of usage to a friend.

There are not expletives strong enough. In a nutshell: it's a pyramid scheme for following people you don't know on Twitter. It asks for your username and password. Terrifying.

A pretty comprehensive list, I think.

"Late last year, my family found a line-a-day diary maintained by my great-aunt from 1937 to 1941. She was in her early teens, living on a small farm in rural Illinois with her two brothers, one of which was my grandfather." Now it's being syndicated, one line per day, on Twitter.

"This is the real line-a-day diary of a young farmgirl in 1937. It is maintained by @griner."

"Bio i am a house elf but no one understands me. i like wearing black tea cozies, listening to my chemical romance, and bdsm. sometimes i do emo weed with hermione." Fanfic invades Twitter.

"Teams from around the globe have analyzed figures and come up with a secret formula for App Store success. I share these findings today, ABSOLUTELY FREE. Success is made up of: a FLASHLIGHT.... and DIRTY WET FART SOUNDS!!! Tweetie is the only app that bundles together these two incredible features FOR THE VERY FIRST TIME." Amazing. I must get this!

Kotaku picked up on the L4D Twitterbots I wrote. Needless to say, the discussion thread descended into general Valve-baiting.

"..some tweets were destined for fail." - or, at least, not for public consumption. Oh dear.

"The city is here for me to use, and it tells me so." Indeed.

"Sometimes you want to follow someone on Twitter, but you don't want them to know you're following them. We present to you TweetStalk ‒ the simple way to stalk Twitter users without having to follow them." Oh for heavens' sake.

"We hijack innocent tweets, subject them to our patent pending penisization process by replacing certain words with 'penis', and republish it for your entertainment. We find it funny."

I am amazed that anyone would have the patience to respond to Mike Arrington's general arsery, but it seem the Twitter team do. They are better men and women than I.

"The value lies in the network of people and how they illuminate the things I don’t know." Rands hits the nail on the head. It's about who you know, and how you make use of them. Just like real-world friends. Hint: Scoble is using it wrong.

"What about “the big now,” though? It’s shorthand for the enhanced and deepened sense of simultaneity - of the world’s massive parallelism - that certain digital artifacts lend us. "

"Botanicalls Twitter answers the question: What's up with your plant? It offers a connection to your leafy pal via online Twitter status updates that reach you anywhere in the world." Fun physical computing project.

Exhaust data is, I think, a clear case of "phatic communication." This is communication with little hard, informational content, but lots of emotional and social content. [It] doesn't get much said, but it has social effects so powerful, it gets lots done

"Swotter reads books to Twitter, and via Twitter to the world." It just finished reading Ulysses aloud. It is awesome.

Twittercal is "a free service that connects your Twitter account to your Google Calendar". Very nice!

Dave Winer++ : "As a system designer, I'd like to believe that Twitter or something like it will always be there. I'm not sure of that yet, but it seems we're close."

The Jodrell Bank telescopes are twittering what they're looking at. Beautiful. Devices talking to devices.

'"Friends" still isn't the right word.' - Kottke on Twitter, with much strong truth, notably this.

"the phatic function is communication simply to indicate that communication can occur." Leisa Reichelt on "ambient intimacy", Twitter, and some Bakhtinian ideas.

Beautiful Twitter client from the Iconfactory.