Update: we’ve disabled the bot now as it was a simple proof of concept that has served its purpose

You may have heard of Twitter.If not then let’s just say that it’s a cross between SMS and blogging; a way to tell people that choose to listen to you - your followers - whatever you like as long as it’s only 140 characters long. Try it. You may not get it immediately but chances are you’ll be hooked pretty quickly, especially if you’re proactive in building your network.

Here at Siftware we love Twitter and have been using it for a quite a while. We like it so much that we felt it was time to start putting our web development skills to use by utilising Twitter’s API. We’ve a few ideas in the pipeline but our first one was a bit of fun.

@anonymise is a twitter bot, written using the Symfony web development framework that sits there waiting for people to follow it. When they do it immediately follows the user back and sends them a direct message with usage instructions. The user can then choose to unfollow @anonymise again.

When any user being followed by @anonymise sends it a direct message @anonymise will simply tweet the contents of the message verbatim but NOT divulge the identity of the original sender. Simple.

You can also choose to follow us on Twitter using @siftware.

On Saturday the 31st of January a new Directgov innovation blog was launched at the UK Government Barcamp in London. The Directgov | innovate developer network has been provided to “inform the greater developer community about available resources, to provide a platform to connect with one another, and to showcase new ideas with the aim of supporting and encouraging innovation.”

At Siftware we are particularly interested in the new service as we were closely involved with its rollout by taking the supplied designs applying them to the leading open source blog Wordpress as a Wordpress Theme.

Sharon Cooper the Director of Strategy and Proposition at Directgov said of our involvement: “Siftware were extremely responsive to our needs. They did a good job and within a tight time window.”

Link: http://innovate.direct.gov.uk/

Directgov is the government’s flagship digital service, welcoming more than 11 million visitors every month.