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, I Have been working on another pet project that will allow for easier lookups of dictionary, acronyms, #hashtags, weather and more on twitter.

The results of the project is out, and users now have a new tool called TwitLookup, 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 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 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 or follow me at @keithdsouza.

TwitLookup