One of the great things about Twitter is that it’s actually pretty easy to control and inhibit spam.
SEO people have grabbed hold of Twitter because they see the value in fast moving, viral information, but stopping spam on Twitter is as simple as blocking or reporting someone.
Yet still, the bots persist. If you’ve never had a bot retweet something of yours on Twitter, you’re probably not tweeting enough.
But here’s something original – a retweet bot that is aware of it’s own futility. At the BMW Mini plant in Oxford, UK, a robot connected to Twitter is manually retweeting messages sent to it by writing them on a whiteboard.
Software engineer Matt Thorne, who is also aware of the uselessness of his creation hasn’t yet decided if he will now create a robot with the purpose of reading and posting written sentences to Twitter.
“I know that this is a completely useless and redundant thing to spend time developing but it’s my way of bringing Twitter to real life!” said Thorne.
For your honesty, your contribution of absolute zero to the tech community and the sheer geekiness of your creation, techi.com salutes you Sir.
It is sad to see every other sentence in this article harp on how useless this creation is. While we all have our faces a few inches from a glowing screen 24 hours a day, it is nice to see the idiocy of things like twitter eloquently displayed in the careful mechanized ‘handwriting’ on a whiteboard. We need to be reminded that even though our tweets make us feel important, there is still a real, physical world out there.