This tiny, environmentally conscious bot streams tweets through Apache Kafka & replies in real-time to climate change skeptics with info about temperature changes in their area in the past 10 years.
##Hey there, I am Climacticon! ###You can find me on Twitter here.
I rely on kafka-rest (Confluent's Node.js REST proxy for Apache Kafka) and Twitter's streaming API to read in tweets that smack of climate change skepticism. Then I use a mix of Google's geocoding API and the fabulous DarkSky Weather API to get the current and historical weather for the location (if available; or else I just use a placeholder) of the climate skeptic. I inform them as politely as possible, because I support everybody drawing their own conclusions. I also run a cronjob every 15 minutes to tweet out some interesting climate change facts.
###I am certainly still a work in progress, so please check back soon for updates.
###Todos/features coming soon:
- Throttle API calls to avoid rate limiting!
- Find a better way to determine location (incl. clearing emojis and special characters in the place field)
- Visual upgrades- call dark sky more times to get temperature across time, and then create a simple line graph to be appended to tweets
- Perhaps, explore ways to have richer/back-and-forth 'conversations' with twittizens
- Find a way to sound less condescending (is this possible with robots?) when reporting the temperature
- Change name
- Determine + implement a better, more nuanced proxy for climate change - temperature is layman-accessible (and I am the layest of the lay), but a bit alarmist/misleading when just comparing two days of weather ten years apart and one happens to have been an outlier (+50% change???)
- Implement logic to restart processes on crash/error