A different sort of Twitter bot

I've long held a strong fascination for Twitter in conjunction with LOLCODE. Twitter was pretty much the first vector for people to hear about LOLCODE on its first day, before Reddit and Digg struck. I also thought that LOLCODE would make a good language for a bot running on Twitter: if people could access it via SMS, and it looks close to TXT SPEEK anyway, it could be a compelling combination. That never materialized, but the idea stuck around.

My latest project has been a music recommendation agent for Twitter. Yes, Twitter bots are so 2007, but I'd like to think that recom.me brings something new to the table by giving user queries some persistence. Not only does the bot react on Twitter, but it creates a permanent URL on its own website.

If you like music and have some tolerance for Twitter, please check the user @recomme out, and send it a band name or solo artist. It should respond within a couple minutes with a list of other, similar musicians worth checking out. Respond again with “more” (or, if you prefer, “MOAR”), it'll send a few more artists to consider. I designed it to be easy to use via SMS at, say, the record store.

If you're not on Twitter, you can still explore a sample query, or read more at the about page.

This is just an early preview version of the site. Thanks to the awesome guys at The Echo Nest, whose APIs are behind the uncanny recommendations, recomme should soon be able to learn about your tastes and customize its recommendations for you.

P.S.: We're in the final hours of the LOLCODE Back-to-School sale. I have no idea when Spreadshirt will offer such a good discount again.