Robot Stories

A social experiment

Robot stories is a social experiment, celebrating people and their stories!
Every 6 hours we honour a trending topic by visually merging people’s tweets.

https://twitter.com/robot_stories/

History

Yes, we asked ourselves the million dollar question: “How can we visualize the interaction with our twitter account?”

In the spirit of Kyle McDonalds Twitter experiment one of our first idea’s was to change the profile picture of our Twitter account with the profile picture from someone who retweeted our tweets.
http://upstart.bizjournals.com/news/technology/2013/11/13/entrepreneurs-christians-nazis-tweet.html?page=all

But because of the constant changing of the profile picture we realised that the reward for someone retweeting would be too low. It just didn’t make sense to people… Another restriction was that Twitter blocked us for making too many requests on their server.

In the meantime at Little Miss Robot we were working on a project that involved Twitter integration where we needed to combine trending topics and tweets with pictures.

From that point on it became clear where this project was heading.

We were going to create a new Twitter profile that visualises a combination of trending topics and then sends them out as new tweets. We call it Robot Stories.

It’s a train, it’s plane?

Robot Stories is an artwork, a social experiment and a reason for us to learn.

So far we have the Twitter page, a website and an iOS app made with Swift.

We learned much more about working with the Twitter stream api , how to handle back-end technology’s, services, queuing and automatisation, the Swift programming language, how to incorporate our own HTML/CSS framework (FLOW) into these types of projects and much more.

Ayo Technology

So what is really going on here?

We capture three tweets that include an image within the context of a trending topic. Then we blend these 3 images together and post a new tweet containing the image and a message “including the trending topics and the users involved”. All of this is done automatically.

It’s a bundle of ‘components’ doing all the heavy lifting on a server in France somewhere. And oh yeah. It’s all done in Node.js

It was harder than expected to create a stable system.
Especially for something that at first sight seemed to be so trivial…

To try and point out what could go wrong with this ‘simple’ concept here are some parameters to which a tweet must validate against before it can be accepted in our system.

• it needs to contain an image
• the containing image must be ‘usable’

converting from RGB to HSV color space and checking brightness

• it can not be a retweet
• it can not be a tweet generated by Robot Stories
• the trending topic of the tweet may not already be in our queue
• the user may not already be in our queue

We decided to go for a queuing system to make sure that when something goes wrong, we still have enough data waiting in line to be processed and tweets can continue to be generated and send out.

The complete process looks something like this:

ENJOY THE CELEBRATION!

It will take us probably at least a year from now before we can start to check for social relevance. Once we have enough data we’ll have to take a good look under the hood and see if what we have gathered can be relevant in other domains.

We could even make a yearbook. A real analog one!

We invite you to become a part of the story!

http://www.twitter.com/robot_stories
http://demo.littlemissrobot.com/robot_stories