Ian Kirk - SQL DBA

So I had been hanging out in the Twitter world for half a year, but I was certainly more of a lurker than a participant.  This changed when I ran head-long into a few of the Twitter monsters at the SQL PASS Conference this past week.  I realized what my friend Paul had been, well, twittering about for the past months - it’s a useful process of delivering basic information in near real-time.

It’s already been written, and will continue to be in ways I can’t expect to match, about how fantastic of a contribution Twitter had on the PASS event.  However, some of the inefficiencies were wildly apparent to me - I couldn’t quickly or easily see the hashtag conversations from my mobile phone.  Now maybe I was overlooking something, but it just wasn’t happening.  I would switch between my twitter update software and my Opera mini browser, one to update, one to be updated by the community I don’t already follow.  This quickly lead me back to Paul.

Paul (@pwnicholson) and my brother-in-law Garrett (@phragmunkee) set out together to resolve this very issue a few months ago.  Out of their hard work came a re-tweet bot.  Here, like-minded individuals will @reply or direct message to a central user account, and that account, under the control of the bot, will re-tweet it back to all followers.  This way, you don’t have to follow everyone around in your community / event / etc, nor do you need to bounce over to the Twitter search page to monitor the hashtag.

So - apply this retweeter to the PASS conference.  All of those crazy Twitterers that were keeping the hashtag warm would instead be direct messaging (for a cleaner look overall) or @reply to the @SQLPASS account.  Then, all of the people that are lurkers can simply follow @SQLPASS to get updates on all the latest gossip.

But why stop in Seattle?  Why shouldn’t there be a re-tweet account that lives beyond the PASS gathering and keeps all of these new faces connected as they scatter about the country?  And should it just be one - why not several?  @SQLQuestions anyone?  @SQLGossip?  The possibilities are endless.

Paul’s post on the re-tweet bot gives better examples and probably explains it all better than I have.  They haven’t really unlesashed the bot for the open market, but I’ve got connections, so I can get started as soon as I can think of the appropriate first account - maybe it’s @SQLPASS?  The bot is white-listed by twitter and in action for the Nashville Predators fan group, running as @PredFans.  It’s a beautiful sight - reading only the tweets on topics you want from a large group.

Comments, questions, suggestions?  I’ll let everyone know when I get an account up and running…