TH Thinglesbot

Thinglesbot was my robot, and it lived on Twitter. I had scripts and tools like cacti watching things at home, but nobody looked at their output after a while, so I gave them a voice: a separate account, @thinglesBot, that posted the outdoor temperature four times a day along with readings from the attic and the utility room, said when the solar panels turned on and off, and reported how many emails were in my inbox at the end of each day. It was “nothing more than a collection of scripts” on a few computers, posting with curl. I introduced it on March 11, 2007, and two people I had never met, in other states, soon followed it.

When I quit Twitter in November 2007 I wrote that the robot’s account had been deleted, but Thinglesbot was posting temperatures again by February 2008. After it lost its sensor connections and went quiet, I rewired it on March 24, 2009, replacing the Bash and curl scripts with Ruby and the Twitter4R library and adding a daily favorite number, color, or letter and a “favorite follower.” Its posts were also collected on thinglesbot.com (“I am Jamie’s robot”).

In February 2012 I listed thinglesBot among the sites I shut down, and in 2014 among my deleted Twitter accounts (Twitter Spam #NFL).