Jeff Keen

I went to a programming meetup the other night, and they were running a contest for OSCON tickets—“tweet as us and mention OSCON and we’ll randomly select someone at the end of the night who will win a badge to the OSCON conference”. I hadn’t even heard of OSCON, but apparently it was an open source developers conference right here in Austin TX. ANNND the tickets were pretty expensive. “A valuable prize”, I thought.

But I hate whoring my twitter feed out, tweeting at things and mentioning brands. I follow people that have no problem with it at all, and maybe I should just relax. But nah, I don’t do that.

So I wanted to make the tweet funny enough to stand alone, and spent the duration of one of the less interesting talks crafting this gem:

New favorite twitter account, described as “COFFEE LOVER. GRAPHIC DESIGNER. DEFINITELY NOT A WOLF PRETENDING TO BE A MAN”. This is solid gold.

Back in the early days of Twitter, I made a Twitter bot. All it did was search for tweets containing “zing!”, and then it would reply to that tweet with “OH SNAP!”.

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zinger_search = Twitter::Search.new('zing!')
zinger_search.each do |msg|
  if msg["text"] =~ /\szing(!+)$/i
    tweet_id = msg["id"]

    Msg.transaction do
      unless existing_msg = Msg.find(:all, :conditions => ["tweet_id=?", tweet_id]).first
        reply_tos = [msg["from_user"], msg["to_user"]]
        formatted_reply_tos = reply_tos.compact.collect { |r| "@#{r}" }.join(" ")
        from_user = msg["from_user"]
        msg_text = "#{formatted_reply_tos} OH SNAP!"
        new_msg = Msg.create(:reply => msg_text, :from_user => from_user, :tweet_id =>tweet_id)
        twitter.post(new_msg.to_s)
      end
    end
  end
end

Unsurpisingly, it got shut down after a month or so. But surprisingly, it was pretty well loved by the people it replied to. I saved some responses which I sent to Twitter as a plea to let me keep autosnap alive (which they rejected).

thisisconlan: Holy crap. @autosnap is like the sycophantic friend I never had! I’m in love (so to speak).

Cianmm: @alancostello bursts into uproarious laughter Oh, how I love@autosnap

benofsky: @autosnap lol wtf

CannonKnapp: @autosnap haha my A-MAZE-ZING @tweelove got an auto OH SNAP!

theadb: @autosnap lol wasn’t expecting that

harrisj: @senorcorazon If you end your tweets in ZING! (with an exclamation point), then @autosnap will back you up on twitter…

Nourn: I actually just found out about this from fetching my replies, but @autosnap replies to your messages that end with “ZING!” Try it out.

flickrlovr: @autosnap bwahahahaha.

Phatemokid: hahahahahahah awesome @autosnap

theferf: ROFL! Just got pinged by @autosnap > “End a tweet in ZING! and I’ll snap you. It’s not spam if people love you.” Kinda funny.

duffbluff: I am definitely following @autosnap after the unexpected snap I received! Lmao

MySecretSelf: @autosnap Made my profile public just so you would OH SNAP me..

SatelliteFeed: @autosnap I haven’t gotten snaps since college! Awesome!

brenjamin: @autosnap heh.. cool.

willia4: Ok. @autosnap might be the best bot on twitter.

danauer: @autosnap I love you.

EarthaDelights: Haha… don’t think I’ve ever seen @autosnap before. I like it.

BS_Rob: @bafadam @autosnap is pretty awesome.

bafadam: @fhorton @autosnap is brilliant.

Fhorton: @AronHead Holy fuck, I’m totally following @autosnap

johnbrougher: @autosnap We need more “OH SNAP!“s around here. My hat is off to you, sir/ma’am.

JPhilipson: @autosnap it’s people like you that make teh internetz awesome again..

emesser: WTF? @autosnap? That’s… a handy service. I think.

vojha: @autosnap LMAO…

miahz: RT @_gudo lol @autosnap | The things up with which people come…

_gudo: @DontHateBeHated haha.. yeah.. i just ZING ’d and @autosnap hit me w/ the OH SNAP! lol…

GeminiAce: @autosnap I don’t know why that cracks me up so much. lol!

LouTreize: Amazing! End your tweets with a Zing! and you get snapped from@autosnap

ELROSS: @autosnap That…..is freaking awesome. Thank you.

fmll: .. hahah has anyone seen @autosnap ? Just made me chuckle.

nicksieger: @kofno hope you enjoyed the reply from @autosnap as much as I did :)

frsvirtual: this is late, but i thought it was funny i got “oh snap’d” the other day by@autosnap lol heh. :)

wryknow: there’s an account on Twitter that any time you end a tweet with the word Zing! they’ll reply to you with OH SNAP! @autosnap. it’s awesome.

reedbraden: Apparently if you end a tweet in Zing!, @autosnap replies, “OH SNAP!” How incredibly pointless but amazing!

erob1: Because of @autosnap, I might end every tweet in ZING!

benleis: @autosnap Thanks! You’re awesome

jzy: this will grow like wildEfire @autosnap via @betsyphd

joshuawhite: @autosnap // you sir, are the greatest auto-twitter-replier-thing-a-ma-jiggy ever.