A bot that randonly selects a brewery from Vancouver using GrowlerFill.ca's API (once it's made public) and randomly selects a beer (once the data is available) from that brewery then gets the Untapped rating for that beer and tweets a 'recommendation'.

I work on a couple of projects that use Git tags at least once a day for deployment, and would like to be notified that a tag has been created. This idea occurred to me, though really it shouldn't be a polling app like I envision below but rather Git should have a post-commit hook set up which sends to some notification service (Slack?!).

Algorithm for a node bot that notifies of a new tag in Git:

1. on init, just store the output of git ls-remote in variable1
2. every 15 minutes:
   1. store git ls-remote in variable2
   2. compare variable1 to variable2
   3. parse the differences
   4. for each difference:
      1. notify me of the changes
      2. copy variable2 to variable1
      3. delete variable2

I'm going ahead with https://thoughtstreams.io/sillygwailo/twitter-bot-ideas/3737/ I have the first half built, and the second half is to register the Twitter account. Then I need to figure out how to post a tweet with multiple images, one with the Google Map it creates, another with the first result from a Google Images search for the words it comes up with. Then associate the tweet with the location. Do I make the words hashtags?

There's a Wordnik Hackathon coming up. Since I'll be traveling on the Friday, I won't participate directly, but I do hope to have something ready to show off by the time it rolls around.

Feature request of RSS readers: ability to subscribe to a feed and specify a date, after which it unsubscribes from that feed. Maybe it shows a notification a day or two before reminding you that the app will automatically unsubscribe, at which point you can decide if you want to stay subscribed for another period of time or permanently.

I got a lot of love to give, and right now my only outlet is my ThoughtStreams.

Feature request of Twitter more so than an app idea: I’d like to send a tweet that only appears on the timelines of people I’m following and who follow me back. For example, if I want someone to DM me, they must be following me. If I mute replies from people I don’t follow, I miss out on a bunch of stuff. Maybe this is a problem Slack solves?

This would only work if GitHub Pages had a post-render hook, that is, fire off a hook when it's done rendering a page. Not a post-commit webhook, but a post Jekyll-render hook. Ideally it would include front matter (such as the permalink) so I could do stuff based on the ID I give it. For example, my Just a Gwai Lo: Questions blog has the ID of the tweet I reference in each post. I'd love to have it add an automatic reply to that specific tweet with a link back to the comments page so that people could comment at more length.

The Travelling Salesman Problem, but for transit and walking tours. There are a few online tools that generate the quickest route between points on a map, but they assume driving. I'd like one for transit, that, OK, helps you get your errands done around town, that would be cool. I'd also like one for tourists: given a set of lat/lon coordinates, give me the fastest transit routes between each with some time in between each point (say a half an hour, or a random amount of time between 30 minutes and 60 minutes) to run your errands. For tourists, randomly generate a walking tour like Walks.io does for tours around rail stations in the UK.

Have you seen people post screenshots of text on Twitter, and highlight (by selecting the text) a section they want to call out?

Here's an example:

These aren't "tech" companies. And this isn't a "sharing" economy. It's a profitable route around employment laws. pic.twitter.com/1RrENKT0Y8

— Susie Cagle (@susie_c) March 31, 2014

I thought maybe one could automate that process, and make it random. It would assume PhantomJS is capable of selecting text as a person could with a mouse (I'm not sure it's possible to automate that part), and then take a 'screen cap' of just the text near and including the selection (I'm sure that's doable). You'd probably want to screencap a "Readability" version of the page, plus it would pick an article at random (somehow?).

Similar to this idea and this idea, I wish Buffer and HootSuite emailed me 5 minutes before they were to tweet a scheduled tweet, just in case I should change my mind. It should be doable by a third-party: Buffer, at least, can give you your update schedule, and you can have it check to see if you have a pending update scheduled for that time, and then notify you in advance that it's about to be sent out.

Gmail has this great feature where you can undo sending an email within 5 seconds. It's in Labs, but I turn it on for every account. Every week, I undo send for whatever reason. Never out of regret, but just because I might have missed something. I'd like that for Twitter. Countless times have I tweeted a typo and a few minutes later discovered that fact. The other blunders have been replies where I press send by accident when the tweet is not fully-formed or, even worse, has a typo. For tweets that don't need to be sent right away, I'd like a client to show it in my timeline as if it were published but with maybe an indication that I have a few seconds/minutes to change my mind. It wouldn't actually post until that time has elapsed. Twitter's most frequently requested feature is typo correction. I can with 100% certainty they will never add that feature. Think of the implications. But clients can add an "Undo" feature before it's actually sent out.

Related to a previous idea, take the tweets from last night and pick 50 of them at random. When you wake up, you'll have an email waiting for you with those 50 tweets. It would pick the tweets from where you left off if you have a $25/month Tweet Marker account (I might be interested in a per-account price if it was in the low single digits per month, say $2/month) account, or just from a certain time if you don't. If I thought for a second you could reliably embed tweets using Twitter's JS, I'd suggest making them all embedded tweets so that Cards show up too. Set the Tweet Marker to the latest tweet at the time when the email was sent. You'll just have to be OK with missing the tweets not included in the email, safe in the knowledge that a computer looked deep within your soul and chose tweets based on an algorithm you half-understand.

The bot/app would be called Tweets From Last Night.

A bot that takes all your unfinished bot ideas and randomly selects one of them for you to work on, and tweets you. Maybe it looks at the people you follow (or the people that follow you) on Twitter, and says "Hey, @[random follower of you], the next time you see @[your twitter account], remind [gender] that to work on [project XYZ]!" to give some social oomph to it. Those followers would have to opt-in, but could only be people that you know.

You'd have to have a machine-readable list of unfinished projects, maybe some of them have URLs like a GitHub repository.

A bot that follows some high-frequency accounts and RTs one tweet from the previous 24 hours from each account. The interval would be fuzzy, that is, 24 hours give or take. The Twitter account associated with it would be private and only followed by you. The bio would be up-front about what it's doing and whom it's doing it for, in case the person feels uncomfortable about it and decides to block it.

After a day or so, look at your previous day's tweets. Take the replies you made and look to see if there are any faves, retweets or replies to those tweets. If not, store in a database the name of the person who you replied to with the the tweet in question. At the end of the month, tally up the usernames you replied to and rank them. Send an email with a report of the replies that went ignored.

The people with the most ignored tweets are ignoring you, so maybe you can spend the energy more usefully. Also, use the data to evaluate which replies got ignored. Maybe those aren't funny, insightful, etc.

Make a list of tweets to be posted anytime in the future. Set a timeframe of normal waking hours. Randomly select a tweet from the list. Randomly select the day and time to tweet them. Give me a reminder 5 minutes ahead of time and give me a y/n prompt. Alternatively, a vigilance control. That is, stop tweeting if I haven't signaled that I'm alive/not comatose. Not like Buffer where time slots are pre-selected, and not like HootSuite where individual tweets are scheduled. It could use HootSuite to do the scheduling/tweeting, but the bot would have to choose the time randomly given the constraints above.

Get three random words from Wordnik and find the location associated with them at what3words, assigning the location to the tweet's metadata. Download a static map using the Google Maps Static Map API and adorn the tweet with the map's image.

Using Foursquare's real-time API, when you check in on Foursquare, take the latitude and longitude of the venue and feed it to what3words. Capitalize the words in the response and say that you're at that location, but use the 4sq.com link so people can know where you really are if they click the link.

An app that takes a high-frequency RSS feed (more than 2 posts a day) and randomly selects one of them and makes an RSS of those items, keeping the last 10 or so days of single items. Maybe Yahoo! Pipes can do this?

https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Ascanbc%20pedestrian&src=typd

ScanBC is an amateur radio scanning community, and they tweet out any incident they hear involving emergency crews. Sometimes incidents involving collisions between pedestrians and vehicles cluster, so it would be interesting to build some stats. One could just search for 'from:scanbc pedestrian' and get raw counts, but it would be interesting to have a map of the incidents and see how they cluster.

Using your contacts, make a group of cronies. Among your cronies, make a list of venues a majority likes to hang out at. For example, Venue A is liked by 5 out of 6 people, so that's a majority venue. Venue B is liked by 4 out of 6 people, but people don't overlap. That's also a majority venue. Venue C is liked by 3 out of 6 people, that's a majority venue. All 6 people want to hang out, and there will always be someone who hates the venue, so the app chooses at random (no debating, no complaining) which venue to hang out at. Those people will have to put up with that venue for one night. The odds are just as good next time that they'll go somewhere they like. Maybe the last venue is taken out of the pool. Not everybody will be happy all the times they hang out, but everybody will be happy some of the times they hang out. Don't you want your friends to be happy? Problem definition by GregEh. The app's name would be, of course, Cronies.

Less a Twitter bot idea than a general (baseball-related) bot idea:

1. you check into a stadium in Foursquare and reference a specific game that you're attending
2. the bot looks up the starting lineup and picks a player to focus on for a whole inning. Weighted towards position players and against pitchers and especially the DH.
3. you watch that player and that player only. See how they prepare for each pitch, what they do while on the bases, etc. They never leave your sight.

This won't work if you don't attend the game. TV broadcasts can't follow individual players.

Every time I check into Foursquare and start off with "Reading" and then a book title + author name, post to my "Richard is Reading" Twitter account with a geo-located tweet. Maybe do an Amazon.com lookup of the title. More detail at on my notes page. A levelled-up app would allow anybody to connect their 4sq and a Twitter account of their choice and post there.

Take a Twitter timeline (follow some image-heavy accounts), and send all the images to Google Image Search. Scrape the suggested search for that image, and just post the text. Or maybe the synonyms for each word. Or maybe rhyming words for each non-article word. Or maybe antonyms: "The opposite of this image is...".

Take the attendance of a sports event, then subtract it from the event's venue, giving you X. Pick a random emotion E.

Tweet something with the following pattern:

"I feel [emotion E] for the [X] people [that didn't show up to | missed] [Team 1] beating [Team 2] [game score] at [Stadium S] [today | tonight]."

Every day, choose a random MLB game to watch and tweet it as if it were meticulously selected. Data from Excel spreadsheets [1, 2] or an API, all of which are unofficial.