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BayAreaGolf Twitter Bot – Instructions
We’ve all been there. You book a tee time for 4 people and either a.) someone backs out and you can’t find anyone or b.) you think that you can fill the slots and they don’t materialize. Either way, it sort of sucks.
In comes the BayAreaGolf Twitter bot that I mentioned in the previous post. The bot is designed to help people with an opening or two in their booking.
Setting up the BayAreaGolf bot is easy.
1.) If you don’t have a Twitter account, go get one.
2.) In your status field, type ‘follow bayareagolf’
3.) When you have an opening in your group, send a message to @bayareagolf – Include the course, number of openings, date and time
For example:
@bayareagolf Cinnabar Hills, 1 slot, 4/26, 7:20
4.) When you see something that works for you, send a direct message to the original sender.
Once an hour, the bot will compile all of the messages sent in and send them out.
What is the Bay Area? Great question. I kind of assumed that it would be San Francisco Bay but that is a bit vague. Pre-kids, I was willing to drive pretty far for golf. If I’m in San Jose, I’d drive to San Francisco to play at Presidio or to Monterrey to play any of those courses. I drive to Livermore and Pleasanton now, so I guess it should be anywhere in that triangle, but I don’t want to exclude Marin, which has some great courses too. I suppose if you live in the San Francisco Bay Area and are willing to drive to a course, it is in the Bay Area.
BayAreaGolf Twitter Bot
A few weeks ago, Fred Wilson announced that he was working on a reply bot for Twitter that would let users send @ replies to @lotd (lyric of the day). The bot was simple and would compile all of the messages and send them out on a regular basis. It is fun because usually I have no ida what the songs are, but once in a while an old punk rock song or really old country song (Hank Williams, early Johnny Cash) comes across, I see it in Twhirl and smile.
Coincidentally, the same weekend that Fred launched @lotd, I had booked a tee time for 4, but only had me and a buddy. Wouldn’t it be cool if I could send a tweet to a group of subscribers (not necessarily my followers) to let them know that I have a tee time at a particular course and they could direct message me to join the group. I figured that courses could use this too to announce last minute specials to fill open slots. I set up @bayareagolf.
Not being a programmer, I was hosed. I couldn't write a Twitter script if my life depended on it, I had a cool idea, but no way to implement it. In one of his posts, Fred credited Whitney McNamara as the person who wrote the @lotd script. I reached out to Whit and he graciously shared the script with me. Apparently it was pretty simple to implement providing you understand PERL. For me, it was like trying to read the Dead Sea Scrolls.
In another instance of coincidence, Socialtext, my company, hosted a Super Happy Dev House this past Saturday. I knew that I could probably find someone to at least get me pointed in the right direction to get this script going. Enter Brandon Noard.
Brandon is one of the many really smart people that I work with and he also happens to be a PERL guru. He was able to quickly understand what it is that I wanted to do and look at the script and make the appropriate modifications. Within about an hour, we had something working.
When a user sends an @ message to @bayareagolf, the script compiles all of the entries and once an hour sends out an update. Find openings with cool, Twitter minded people.
The only real hurdle that we had was figuring out how to host a PERL script on GoDaddy, who does my hosting. Brandon is being super cool about hosting this script on his personal server while I try to figure this out. I’d love to duplicate this for other locations, but don’t want to take advantage of Brandon. If anyone knows how to add this, LMK.
The bot is cool. I recognize that the market for , golfers, who live in the Bay Area, who are on twitter, is pretty small, but if it helps me fill a spot or two, rockin. I’m all for things that put real world social into social networking. I’ll post instructions soon.
