Automating Social Media: Sending Tweets with Apache NiFi: Building A Smart Bot

[#1]

Automating Social Media: Sending Tweets with Apache NiFi: Building A Smart Bot

This is the new processor, PutTwitterProcessor, it will use Twitter4J to send tweets from a parameter you set.

This is an example tweet and my reply to it. It's a regular tweet.

This is the result of a run. I put the tweet id and datetime stamp in the result attribute.

Another example:

You need to create a Twitter application and obtain the Consumer Key, Consumer Secret, Access Token and Access secret. If you have a lat and long in your data you can send that. It's optional. The message takes expression language and lets you build a message.

JUnit Test of my Processor

JUnit Run Results

Most of the code is using the very easy to use Twitter4J library.

So what can I do with this? In my flow I am ingesting Tweets and with a streaming SQL query I can retweet ones where there's no existing retweet and the followers of the tweet are more than 1,000. I can also feed all this information to a Hive table and then run some machine learning on it to figure out other parameters to filter on for my bot.

This is a start. I put a scheduler on my PutTweet to only tweet every 10 minutes (600 seconds). Let's see how this goes.

SQL for QueryRecord

SELECT * FROM FLOWFILE
WHERE CAST(retweet_count AS DOUBLE) <= 0
AND CAST(followers_count AS DOUBLE) > 1000

Example Message Building

${'user_name':append( ' '):append( ${'location'} ):append(' '):append( ${'hashtags'} ):append(' ' ):append(${'msg'})}

Source:

https://github.com/tspannhw/nifi-puttwitter-processor

Download NAR to install in Apache NiFi lib directory and then restart:

https://github.com/tspannhw/nifi-puttwitter-processor/releases/tag/1.0

[#2]

Quick tip: When you create a free Twitter app at apps.twitter.com, they will let you read and write but not a lot. Don't tweet every 5 minutes for hours or you will get that app's write ability blocked. Also be sure you are no reposting SPAM.