Wordnik API Is The Base Building Block Of Twitter Bots

I’m fascinated by the rise of Twitter bots. Little automated bundles of social media joy, built to spew mostly nonsense, but everyone once in a while you find nuggets of wisdom in the Twitter API fueled bots. Personally I have never built a Twitter bot, only because I don’t need another distraction, and I can see the addictive potential of bot design.

My partner in crime Audrey Watters (@audreywatters), who has hands on experience building her own bots, said something interesting the other day while we were partaking in our daily IPAs—the wordnik APIs it the base building block of any Twitter bot.

Sure enough, when you search “twitter bots wordnik” on the Googlez, you get a wide variety of python, nobde.js, php, and other recipes for building Twitter bots, with almost all of them using the Wordnik API as the core linguistics engine for the bot.

Two overlaps with other stories I written here. 1) I feel the Twitter API holds a lot of potential as a training ground for IoT connectivity, and 2) I think APIs, and specifically the Wordnik API, and the work to come out of Wordnik, like Swagger, has a significant role to play in the future of the Internet.

I know many of us technologists have grand visions of where the Internet is going, and would like things to happen faster. but I think the “smart” everything we are looking for is going to take some time, and is something you can see playing out slowly in things like Twitter bot design. I’m sure there are many negative incarnations, but many of the Twitter bots I’ve seen have been interesting little nuggets of API driven (Twitter & Wordnik) chaos, driving us towards an unknown, but definitely Internet connected, online world.