If you have been wondering the lack of posts in the last couple of days, I have a very valid reason for keeping away. After having developed the Gtalk/Jabber Dictionary Lookup Bot ^[1], I Have been working on another pet project that will allow for easier lookups of dictionary, acronyms, #hashtags, weather and more on twitter ^[2].

The results of the project is out, and users now have a new tool called TwitLookup ^[3], a friendly and useful twitter lookup robot, that will allow users to find dictionary meanings, local weather, meanings for acronyms (FYI, AFAIK, etc), meaning for hashtags used on twitter (#twitter, #sxsw, etc) and live cricket scores.

Using TwitLookup is pretty simple, just sent a message to @twitlookup ^[4] with your query and it will respond back with a appropriate response. However there are certain limitations on what the query can be, you can check TwitLookup ^[3] page to find all the queries you can make to this robot.

If you don’t want the answer to appear on public timeline you will have to follow @twitlookup, after it follows you back, you can send it a direct message instead of sending a message through the public timeline.

Here are some usage examples for using TwitLookup:

@twitlookup dict twitter
@twitlookup acro AFAIK
@twitlookup weather mumbai
@twitlookup hash #twitter
@twitlookup ipl live

Once you send a reply or direct message, the twitlookup robot will lookup your query and respond back with a appropriate answer.

I have created this robot using PHP5, OOPS and Abstract Factory design pattern. I plan to share few insights on how you can write your own twitter robot in the near future. In the meantime do give @twitlookup a try and let me know your feedback on it.

If you want me to write up more lookups feel free to tell me about them by leaving a comment or sending a email to twitter [at] twitlookup [dot] com. If you are on twitter follow @twitlookup ^[4] or follow me at @keithdsouza ^[5].

TwitLookup ^[6]