I used to love writing Twitter bots.

This one uses Markov chains seeded with text from today's top New York Times articles: https://twitter.com/kindanewsy

I created a little starter kit for doing this with Python and hosted free on Heroku: https://github.com/zwass/heroku-twitterbot-starter

Oh this is cool. I regularly teach programming to teenagers, this is giving me tons of ideas. Thanks!

What programming language/libraries did you use for the course? What's sort of background do the students have? Over what period of time is the teaching occurring? I'd love to hear more details about all that.

I'm not the author, just found it interesting. I'm sure you could find contact details on the authors site though.

Very cool. Twitter is a great ecosystem for providing useful bots. I, for one, am quite partial to my own Twitter bot, @dumpmon (http://twitter.com/dumpmon) which crawls pastebin and other sites looking for password dumps.