There’s been quite a bit of anti-Twitter backlash recently, the most notable of which was a Wall Street Journal article ironically published on one of Twitter’s busiest days during SXSW. My friend Ryan is quoted in the article:
“I probably started removing people the first week,” said Ryan Irelan, 31, a Web developer in Raleigh, N.C., who began using Twitter last year. “This constant dinging of updates,” he added, “it really just became totally overwhelming. I don’t see how anyone could get anything done.”
While there’s truth to what Ryan said about Twitter’s potential to be addictive and overwhelming, there’s no doubt that Twitter is going places.
Earlier today, the folks at Woot announced their Woot Twitter-bot and solved a long-standing problem of theirs - how to quickly notify their rabid fan base of their new product offerings. By using Twitter to publish this data, it is therefore available via IM, SMS, or the web - whichever the end user desires.
The Woot Twitter-bot (go take a look, there’s a Woot-Off going on right now!) happens to be my brain-child (I set it up during the last Woot-Off after being unsatisfied with other ways of being instantly notified of new deals), and was recently contacted by Dave Rutledge at Woot, and agreed to allow them to make it official.
The folks at Twitter noticed Woot’s new offering, and had this comment:
As far as we know, Woot is the first to use Twitter like this; as a way to let people keep on top of what’s being sold. Very cool.
The folks at Twitter are sure to like this, because it fits into a very possible monetizing strategy for Twitter: corporate-sponsored Twitter accounts providing updates on flight times, shelling out coupon codes, or promoting TV shows.
For others interested in creating Twitter-bots of their own, I’ve released the source I used to initially create the Woot Twitter-bot. Feel free to download it and do what you please.