README.md

emoji mood

My current mood is 😊 SMILING FACE WITH SMILING EYES 😊

Emoji mood is a twitter bot that picks an emoji at random and then watches twitter for uses of that emoji. It uses those tweets to populate a markov chain to then generate emoji-appropriate tweets of its own.

I'm generally fascinated by emoji, and the purpose of this bot (aside from being occasionally funny and/or charming) is to give an idea of how each emoji is generally used. For example, when monitoring :pig:, emoji mood tends to talk about food a lot more than usual, while :joy: tends to really like Batman vs Superman.

You can see the thing in action at @emoji_mood.

This bot tries to be ethical so its input filtering is pretty enthusiastic. It will completely ignore any tweets that include an @reply, to avoid butting in to private conversations, and will also discard anything that falls foul of dariusk/wordfilter. It'll also ignore any tweets containing a link, and it only monitors English tweets.

This means sometimes it'll be filtering out the majority of the tweets using an emoji, and when its monitoring a less-used emoji this means it'll only have a small handful of inputs. To avoid just recreating tweets verbatim, it'll just stay silent until it's got at least 10 input tweets.

Actually using it

To run it, you'll need to set up the config object in config/default.js like so:

module.exports = {
    creds: {
        // put in valid twitter api/oauth credentials
        consumer_key: 'abc123',
        consumer_secret: 'def456',
        access_token_key: 'ghi789',
        access_token_secret: 'jkl0ab'
    },
    username: 'emoji_mood', // twitter client will ignore incoming tweets
                            // with this username    
    silent: false   // set to true to never actually tweet
                    // -- handy for debugging
}

Then run npm install and then npm start to start it up.