Twitter bots 4040404040404

In the light of Kim Asendorfs NO AI-bot research and the forthcoming family of his yxcv4321  bot, I started looking into Twitter bots again.

Bots are software applications that run automated tasks, often faster than humans could perform them. But the definition of a bot seems quite arbitrary, where do we call an application or a string of actions or scripts a 'bot', and where or when do we call it something else? Is the only reason for calling a scripted set of actions a bot, the fact that the script takes the role (and maybe the place) of a human being as a form of artificial intelligence, like they do for instance on wikipedia, in chatrooms, twitter or spamming us through mail (do they really set out to maximize their chances of success? - which is what often AI delineates)?
And what about the new generations of Twitter web scutter that does not seem to be intelligible in any human-sense kind of way, but do follow scripts and try to maximize something (followers, tweets)?
Here is my collection of  non-sensical web scutter Twitter bots (maybe best understood as degenerative kipple-andy hybrids  -- shout out to Daniel Rourke, the ambassador of Kipple):
https://twitter.com/#!/grdiv

2,755  Tweets,  3  Following,  35  Followers,  6  Listed
https://twitter.com/#!/BurroughsBot

13,759  Tweets,  16,672  Following,  39,022  Followers,  547  Listed

https://twitter.com/#!/Action_Ebooks

18,744  Tweets,  2,374  Following,  2,160  Followers,  51  Listed
https://twitter.com/#!/AutoEbook

3,397  Tweets,  2,000  Following,  327  Followers,  26  Listed

https://twitter.com/#!/Ebook_Compilers

10,888  Tweets,  1,963  Following,  1,706  Followers,  15  Listed
https://twitter.com/#!/SpeakEbooks

7,261  Tweets,  1,977  Following,  1,396  Followers,  17  Listed

https://twitter.com/#!/FriendsEbooks

8,648  Tweets,  2,001  Following,  1,501  Followers,  20  Listed
https://twitter.com/#!/Horse_ebooks <---- Clear winnner!
51,339  Tweets,  0  Following,  2,102  Followers,  173  Listed

Apparently there is a whole ecosystem of ebook bots, tweeting and retweeting each other. this is not the complete list, I should take the time to index that, its so ... filled with botty˜ñjams. 
Besides that, at twitter nobody seems to care if you are a bot copying wikipedia and call it an ebook, and horses apparently make the most successful twitter bots. Or twitter people love horse bots. 

Another Twitter-spider-bot project by jon.satrom, Nick Briz, JODI and me is 4040404040404.  The following text is extracted from the GLI.TC/H READER[ROR] 20111,  p.129-135, written by me. I have to apologize to Nick for publishing it on my blog because he is right, easter eggs are better left easter eggs, but  they began the selling of easter eggs in Albert Heijn already, so I have an excuse. 

On Aug 18, 2011, at 1:44 AM, JODI wrote:
hio Jon R OS etcBoto (for JOn - PLZ read REQuest Below)
directly inspired by your 1998 work http://404.jodi.org/
We would like to offer you the most traffic from our website!
t TTTTTTTT YYyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy -yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyytyfo
Every typo, every malformed URL; we would love to invite you to do something with our 404 page. This contribution to applicable)... Would you be interested?
// yyYYYYYYYYYYY //
//
/firsT idea is a redirection to a twitteraccount /4040404//o
no-tec just 2.0 re-direction ( spam-style/complete-outofcontext)
__wdyt? XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXX


osa Menkm rrrrrrrrrrrrRRRRRRosa Menkm RRRRRR
Pour -- ROSA #*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ys4pvcsVwQI
ROAS AROSAS ROSRIS ROS R ROAS AROSAS ROSRIS ROS ROSUM UM ZumOSUM UM Zum ROAS AROSAS ROS- RIS ROS ROSUM UM Zum ROA
======================== FOr JON ============================= ++++++++++++++++++++++ C+ ######## ++++++++++++++++++++++
__: codewise it doesn!t goahead// the coding%
pro!s always Fails .FAIL

The work 404 error by Jodi, [...] has become not just about an error or non-place, but has been erected as an iconographic work standing for a "desired destination, and spawned a cult of broken link art works. Such works, [...] insist that their spectators establish new conceptual paradigms for approaching these particular works of glitch art.1

On August 18th we asked Jodi to create a special easteregg for the GLI.TC/H website, in celebration of the iconic 1998 work http://404.jodi.org/. The result was 4040404040404, a social spiderhole for tweeting spiders and other web scutter spheres.

When mistyping an URL, or following a 404 link within the GLI.TC/H domain, any user agent will automatically land on 4040404040404. Every agent landing on such a page is redirected to the 404 page, which sends specific user agent information to the 4040404040404 Twitter page that will collect for instance the visitors ip, and append it to the gli.tc/h domain name from which the user was linked in, effectively curating and creating gli.tc/h!s 404 non-space cloud.

But 4040404040404 also exposes Twitters own active (and normally completely obfuscated documentation (or scraping process) of links shared on the microblogging website: when a user shares their 404 (or any other) link on Twitter, Twitter will index this url (to rank its relevance). The 404 page however, redirects the spider back to Twitter, creating a publicly visible feedback loop of Twitter's corporate dark fiber scraping spiders, bots and crawlers. 4040404040404 thus exposes and facilitates the clouds made inside, with the help of the cloud(s).

While many glitchers fear that the potential for glitch will be drastically challenged through cloud computing, 4040404040404 shows a new opportunity for glitching within the clouds.

4040404040404 heavily draws upon spectator literacy (refer- ences to media technology texts, aesthetics and machinic processes). It prompts the spectator to engage not only with technical, but also with subcultural and meta-cultural gestures. This is how users do not consume but instead become active participants in a culture invested in constant re-definition.

= -- ʞʞǝǝǝ
your mail is cut off by the spam filter
[ [ [[ [ [ [[ --[؛ǝɹǝɥ ɯǝןqoɹd ɐ ǝʌɐɥ ı o ıɥ
hi o
404# ɥ/ɔʇ˙ıןb *****ɯɐds***** :ǝɹ :ʇɔǝظqns >ɔʇ˙ıןb@ɥɔʇıןb
< ɥ/ɔʇ˙ıןb :oʇ


,-./0123!"#$%#"&"'"(!)*+++


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1. Rose, Anton. 16.05.2011. Welcome to Artbreak: Kanye West and the Creative Destruction of Compression Artefacts as a Critical Tool in the Avant-garde of Glitch Art.  Unpublished Bachelor Thesis.