would ingratiate themselves into
a target network of 500 Twitter
users by following and trying to
prompt responses from those
users. The lead bot received one
point for each target user who
followed it and three points for
each tweet in which a target user
mentioned the bot. If the bot
was disabled by Twitter due to
spam reporting, the team would
lose 15 points but could continue
with a new bot. Teams were also
able to launch additional bots
to perform countermeasures
against other teams or to help
build the social credibility of their
lead bot, but only interactions
between the lead bot and the target users would generate points.
The first two weeks of the event
were reserved for designing and
coding the bots. The competition
itself was divided into two one-week phases in which the bots
would run without human intervention. Between the two weeks
was a single “tweak day” on which
bot code could be modified and
new strategies deployed.
Our team, Team Electro-
Magnetic Party Time, devised a
strategy for week 1 in which our
lead bot, James M. Titus, followed
all 500 target users while build-
ing social capital and credibility
through automatic posts of cute
cat photos scraped from Flickr
to a blog called Kitteh Fashun,
which was associated with James.
We also deployed secondary bots
that followed the lead bot and
the friends of target users, in the
hope that target users might fol-
low the lead bot after seeing it
was friends with their friends. In
week 2, we stepped up the interac-
tions by trying to actively engage
with the targets in conversation.
To keep the Twitter content from
getting stale, James also tweeted
vague rants and random notes
on his day every couple of hours,
selected from a list the team gen-
erated before the competition.
March + April 2012