(Just a warning – there’s not a deep thought at the end of this post, and there’s no real estate tie in.)
I am @wheeebacon. And I have been suspended by Twitter.
Turns out, "bacon" is an incredibly popular word on Twitter. And as we discovered when we added Twitter to our IDX, the API is pretty easy to use. So that some talented person in 15 minutes or so could write a simple application that searches Twitter every 30 seconds for the word "bacon" and responds "Wheee! Bacon!"
And it turns out, people love to talk about bacon. And people love to invoke @wheeebacon.
Also turns out, there’s also some limits to how often you can make responses before Twitter rules you spam and suspends your account. In our case, in about an hour. If you’re familiar with @wheeepony and @wheeeunicorn, they’ve been suspended too, as of this writing.
Ah @wheeebacon, we barely knew thee.
We had even programmed it to respond in Spanish if someone said bacon in Spanish.
There is at least one bacon-responder that lives on, @baconbaconbacon. They’ve got a set of several responses and don’t answer every person who invokes the bacon. @Wheeebacon had a better avatar.
There’s probably a lesson in there somewhere.
Maybe something about how to get nearly 50 followers in 15 minutes – talk about things people like.
Or maybe something about showing genuine enthusiasm for what you discuss on Twitter…
Wheee! Bacon!
