The recent release of Foamee reminded me that I had never blogged here about plusplusbot, a little toy of a site that I started to work on this past summer. The idea behind plusplusbot is that you can express your (dis)pleasure with something or someone over Twitter, and the site will keep track of the target's score over time. All of this is done over Twitter, in a barnacle-like fashion. The thinking being that Twitter handles message delivery over a variety of mediums (Jabber, SMS, Web) and provides a ready-made social network to piggyback on (you can view the activity of you and those you follow, for example, here's mine). This concept should be familiar to those that have enountered "karmabots" in chatrooms.

The targets can be anything. Companies, food, people, even Twitter itself. For whatever reason, the site has caught on most with Japanese Twitter users, so the homepage is often incomprehensible.

Technically, the site is not too exciting. Like Twitter Digest, it also uses python-twitter to talk to Twitter and templet for simple templates. The site itself is not dynamic at all, instead a script running on one of my machines polls Twitter every two minutes (since it has to fetch both friend updates and direct messages, fetching both every minute would go over Twitter's 70 requests/hour API rate limit). If it determines that a new plusplus or minusminus has been sent, it re-generates those pages (the user's and the target's) and uploads them. The simple design means that the site can be hosted nearly anywhere.