[MicahWedemeyer]

Pretty much everything that tweets in an automated fashion gets unfollowed by me pretty quick. The twitter stream is cluttered enough as is, no need to make it worse by having weather vanes and thermometers screaming alongside my friends who see cute cats.

Maybe I'm missing the point, but I have yet to find a Twitter bot that provides anything of real value.

[ohashi]

I can see a few instances of automated tweeting generating value. I have a bot that tweets the latest headlines from the most popular blogs in a small niche. I'd say a large % of the active people in said niche follow the bot and it gets a lot of retweets and sharing.

Twitter is another way to consume information. RSS aggregators are popular which are automated, twitter can do the same thing over a medium people may be more comfortable with.

I also see value of these without you following them in your stream. I may not want to hear every weather update but when I want to know the weather, it could be nice to know where I can find it updating in real-time in a place I already am.

And to counter the inevitable 'but there is product/site/place X that already does Y': so what? If you look at user behavior just because something exists doesn't mean multiple competitors and ways to consume the same information won't be popular or useful.

[MicahWedemeyer]

I agree that it's unfair to say "so-and-so already does X", since innovating often just takes the form of making something slightly less crappy than it was before.

Unfortunately, my experience with Twitter, and especially automated Twitbots, is that Twitter is the crappy experience that needs to be improved upon. People push data into it because it's easy to do, not because it adds any real value.

Let's take the weather example: Auto-tweeting weather vanes are too noisy to include in your normal stream, so you unfollow them. Then, if you do want that information you have to use a search client, or build some kind of special client/consumer that compiles that info for you. At that point, surely it's easier to use one of the other services. Getting the data out of Twitter in a usable fashion is simply more work than getting it otherwise.