Botomatic Documentation

-- obviously a work in progress ;-)

First, read the introductory blog post: http://blog.smarx.com/posts/announcing-botomatic-com-build-your-own-twitter-bot

Examples

See http://www.botomatic.com/bots/anonomatic and http://www.botomatic.com/bots/deliciomatic for examples.  Read the above blog post for details about how they work.

Service Status

Botomatic is currently in alpha.  Feel free to use it for whatever you like, but don't be surprised if things don't work properly or if there's significant downtime.

Integrating with Your Web Application

To integrate with your own web application, choose the "post ... to the following URL" action in the rules UI.

When an event is posted to your web application, the request will look like an HTTP POST with a content type of application/x-www-form-urlencoded and a body with exactly one parameter called "json".  (NOTE: This is quite likely to change in the future... it would make more sense to just post JSON directly with a content type of application/json.  This hack is to workaround services that can't accept JSON directly, but it seems like a bad idea long-term.)

The contents of that parameter will look like {account: "<twitter acount>", password: "<twitter password>, data: <the posted event>}.  This is a JSON string and should be treated as such.  The contents of the "data" property depend on the type of event.  For tweets and direct messages, it's a JSON serialization of the properties Twitter returns.  See the Twitter API documentation for details.  For new followers, the value of the "data" property is simply the id of the new follower.