Twitterhawk: Clever Twitter marketing, or spam?
Updated at 8:23 PM with statement from TwitterHawk creator. See end of post.
I just got a pointer to TwitterHawk, a clever bot that will monitor Twitter posts for key words and send automated and pre-programmed @ replies to them when those words pop up.
The service actually looks for more than just words. It can also scan for posts from specific locations (how it determines location is not clear to me) or for tweets that are calculated to have generally positive or negative sentiment, or for those that have links embedded in them.
The examples given on the site are for marketing: If you have a coffee shop, for example, you can use TwitterHawk to monitor for tweets about "coffee" in your city, and then send them an automatic reply. If I Twittered, "I could really go for a cup of coffee," for example, I might get a reply back via the service from a coffee shop owner saying "@Rafe, Come to Joe's Coffee and try our Blogger's Blend."
The bot found me.
TwitterHawk has rate limits in place to prevent it from becoming a horrible spammer and abuser of Twitter resources. But it's still a highly commercial concept and will clearly set a few people on edge. It's available at no cost for now, but if ever there was a Twitter service that deserved to have a fee attached to it, this is it.
I set up a test TwitterHawk account that monitors Twitter for one word: "Bananastan." Post an item with that word in it and you may see an auto reply sent to you from the @Webware account.
Update: TwitterHawk creator Chris Duell appears sensitive to the spam issue, and has updated the service so it can only send out one message a day per monitored term. When I tested it earlier, it could send one message per hour. He has posted a press release entitled "TwitterHawk and Spam." Key statements include, "We do not in any way condone using TwitterHawk to aggressive SPAM based marketing tactics to harass or annoy people with advertising material on a regular basis... Our number one focus right now is ensuring that Twitterhawk adds value to all those who come in contact with the service... More SPAM protection measures will be being put in place in the comings days."
Rafe Needleman writes about start-ups, new technologies, and Web 2.0 products, as editor of CNET's Webware. E-mail Rafe. 
Thanks for the interest in TwitterHawk, it will no doubt be of interest to you that we have just released a press release regarding our stance / actions regarding the heated debate on SPAM.
http://www.twitterhawk.com/#spam
Regards,
Chris Duell
As indicated in the sites information, only one reply per day is sent as a maximum, this is to reduce the appeal to people who might want to use the tool as SPAM software. Somebody tomorrow will get a reply for their bananastan comment, but nothing now.
Regards,
Chris Duell
Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz
We'd just like to let you all know that due to the overwhelming support for the ability to confirm replies before they are sent out (i.e., not automatically sent as soon as they are found), we've built this functionality into the site and launched it in the public beta.
Users can now see a queue of matches recently found, and can confirm / delete / edit the response to create a more personalised experience for the recipient.
This should alleviate a lot of the concern people had about replies being sent out to people that might not be the right match for them, even though they met the search criteria.
Thanks for all your support and suggestions, keep them coming :)
Regards,
Chris - TwitterHawk
http://www.twitterhawk.com
Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz
Its a hard to create any service that auto posts something because it will just be called spam.
Since direct replies on Twitter are seldom seen by anyone else but the two parties (explained below), the only people who would complain about such spam are:
1) The receiver - who has presumably stated they want coffee and should only complain about a single approach to them if that approach is geographically inappropriate
2) Followers who set their notifications to see others' direct reply conversations (few do this)
3) Coffee traders in Chicago who have their TweetDecks set for "coffee" and who don't want to see coffee houses clutter Twitter with banal discussions not related to the agricultural situation in South America
So having noted that any business with TweetDeck search columns will be sending a dozen such tweets per day, it sounds like the big value in this Twitterhawk service is the localization aspect. Any Manhattan coffee shop can have Tweetdeck running and respond appropriately to a dozen people per day who talk about wanting coffee IF there are clues those people are in their area of Manhattan. It isn't spam if the response is targeted to an obvious stated need...even if the coffee shop ends up telling 500 Manhattanites per day (who talk about wanting coffee) to drop by (coffee addicts who often post about wanting coffee can always block Joe's after they get the 10th response - but Twitterhawk is hereby advised to limit posts to anyone user to once per year).
And, of course, Joe's Mug of Coffee should know what the results of their tweet were (Twitterhawk could monitor any replies to the reply or if the person followed Joe's soon after).
For instance, we offer a free plugin to solve email overload. Anyone complaining of email overload won't be getting spam if we say "We can help you there". Ten people per day literally say "I wish I had a solution to email overload".
Do you think a sane company would ignore 10 direct leads like that?
A human presses the send button for us when we reply to that.
It is spam if someone in Seattle wants a coffee and Joe's Mug in Brooklyn pipes in...and then only if Joe's Mug doesn't ship a unique special blend.
We tend to tweet 3 people at once with that "We can help" comment to save tweets. The true spam aspect would not be to the people who obviously need help with email overload...but to our followers who already know we can help and don't need to see us tell 20 people per day the same thing.
They would unfollow us if all we did was say "Hi @emailuser234 - we can help" all day.
But even then...they would unfollow only if that were ALL we were posting.
If we posted great content between telling newbies "We can help" they wouldn't mind. That would be the equivalent of customers at the coffee counter not minding as Joe served some new customers with their coffee in the middle of a conversation at the counter.
Or it would be like Joe taking 15 seconds to respond to a tweet on a computer behind the counter while he was otherwise hanging out with his customers at the coffee counter. Nobody would mind. Joe is in business. They know that.
Remember that direct @replies are not seen by one's followers or anyone else (except the person replied to) unless the followers or others have configured their Settings/Notifications to see all direct @replies (and the others would be subscribed to follow a keyword being discussed).
The default setting/notifications on Twitter is to not see direct @replies between people that you aren't following...so people who think of this as spam will never see it.
But some people make it their business to watch that stuff. I set my notifications to see everyone's replies to everyone and decide for myself, as I skim the timeline, what is interesting.
Spam might be a response to "I am home enjoying a nice mug of coffee now".
Twitter is public even if one thinks he or she is just thinking out loud...you may be broadcasting your wants to people around you who can help fill that want and assume you WANT to fill that want. People will soon learn, for instance, not to Twitter the following words: "I wish I knew about a good life insurance plan" if they are not serious about getting an answer. :-)
I hope Twitter or the community fights this junk.
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