Yes, I’ve been at it again and developed another Twitter bot. What makes this one special, however, is the fact that it is my first interactive bot.

So, I would like to introduce you all to @weatherbot - the interactive on-demand Twitter weather service. While it is still very beta, I think it is at a point where it is quite stable. To use it, all you have to do it follow the bot, then send it an @reply with the location you want the weather forecast for. In a few minutes, you should get a direct message from @weatherbot with the forecast for the rest of the current day and the next day in the city you asked for. The bot will report the temperature in Fahrenheit or Celsius appropriate for the requested location.

For example, if you are interested in the weather in Sydney, follow the bot then simply tweet “@weatherbot sydney australia” - without the quotes, of course. As long as you follow the format “@weatherbot city country” it should be able to work out what you want, though for the more generic named places, it might help to put your state/province in as well. The service should work for almost any major city in the world.

For those interested in the technical details, every few minutes the bot grabs its replies timeline using the Twitter API, then creates a queue of requests. From those requests, it will grab your search string and through some special sauce magic figures out the location ID for your request, then grabs an XML packet of the location’s weather forecast using the Yahoo! Weather API. It then parses the XML, extracts the needed information, and forms it into a string which it then sends back to you using the Twitter API as a direct message. The bot manages its queue so you don’t get your weather multiple times from the one request.

Feel free to give @weatherbot a try, and get in contact with me if you get any odd behavior.