Bear's Log

In a recent post Ted mentioned:

So yesterday Dave Winer hooked his version control system up to Twitter. I was just idly wondering how long it would take Bear to hook all of CIA up to Twitter…

umm, about 35 total minutes :)

But I don’t even begin to claim that it was that complicated as I stood on the shoulders of giants. When I saw that CIA.vc offered feeds of the commit messages it was just a matter of wiring Universal Feed Parser to my existing jabber bot framework. I like updating Twitter using XMPP as it allows me to hang other items off of the bot easily and implement them as simple commands that are sent to the bot.

So it’s all written but right now I’m not turning it on for the simple reason that CIA.vc generates huge amounts of traffic hourly and I don’t think anyone really wants to receive twitter updates for all of them. Here are the stats I copy-n-pasted just now from the CIA.vc status page:

4316 messages so far today, 4145 messages yesterday 13507 messages so far this week, 27222 messages last week 36635 messages so far this month, 120666 messages last month 1632723 messages since the first one, 1.46 years ago, for an average of 28.27 seconds between messages

I’m thinking of making it a direct msg bot that allows you to send it either a direct twitter message or an IM of the project you want to track and then it will send updates for that project to you. Stay tuned