Over the holidays, I wrote myself a link shortener to take advantage of the fact that I've been paying for a vanity domain (an.ton.io) and to refresh my memory of HTTP redirect etiquette and the Googlebot. Watching the stats over the last month, I've been amazed at what I had erroneously perceived as amazing Twitter juice as I would easily get 1-3K clicks on any link I shared with was even mildly interesting. This morning though, I became suspicious when within 1 minute of an un-Godly early morning moment, I had received over 200 distinct clicks on my Twitter link.

A quick sampling of this first minute shed some light on just who listens that early in the morning:

date ip useragent 2012-02-14 06:33:10 184.106.83.185 EventMachine HttpClient 2012-02-14 06:33:10 50.56.19.192 EventMachine HttpClient 2012-02-14 06:33:11 50.19.36.2 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727) yolinkBot 2012-02-14 06:33:11 50.57.137.74 EventMachine HttpClient 2012-02-14 06:33:11 66.228.54.132 InAGist URL Resolver (http://inagist.com) 2012-02-14 06:33:11 184.72.46.156 RockMeltEmbedService 2012-02-14 06:33:11 173.192.79.101 NING/1.0 2012-02-14 06:33:11 89.151.116.53 Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; TweetmemeBot/2.11; +http://tweetmeme.com/) 2012-02-14 06:33:11 50.18.23.200 JS-Kit URL Resolver, http://js-kit.com/ 2012-02-14 06:33:11 46.20.47.43 Mozilla/5.0 (compatible 2012-02-14 06:33:11 69.63.180.247 Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; FriendFeedBot/0.1; +Http://friendfeed.com/about/bot) 2012-02-14 06:33:11 50.18.121.54 UnwindFetchor/1.0 (+http://www.gnip.com/) 2012-02-14 06:33:12 199.59.149.165 Twitterbot/1.0 2012-02-14 06:33:12 184.72.47.46 UnwindFetchor/1.0 (+http://www.gnip.com/) 2012-02-14 06:33:13 212.238.124.233 Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100405 Namoroka/3.6.3 2012-02-14 06:33:15 65.52.0.205 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0) 2012-02-14 06:33:17 50.17.86.151 Summify (Summify/1.0.1; +http://summify.com) 2012-02-14 06:33:18 94.212.250.64 PycURL/7.21.6 2012-02-14 06:33:21 72.55.158.72 Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729) 2012-02-14 06:33:22 50.17.85.42 Java/1.6.0_07 2012-02-14 06:33:34 216.52.242.14 LinkedInBot/1.0 (compatible; Mozilla/5.0; Jakarta Commons-HttpClient/3.1 +http://www.linkedin.com) 2012-02-14 06:33:42 174.37.79.60 Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; ScribdReader/1.0; +http://www.float.com) 2012-02-14 06:33:43 50.19.205.250 Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6 (FlipboardProxy/1.1; +http://flipboard.com/browserproxy) 2012-02-14 06:34:00 64.12.237.20 Jakarta Commons-HttpClient/3.1

What is most fascinating about this is the sheer number of bots (software programs written by humans) wired into my feed (you can tell that these are what are visiting by the "useragent" column which usually identifies one of the main browsers but here identifies hand-written scripts). I expect that a couple of these are from Twitter itself and perhaps a handful of blessed partners (LinkedIn for instance) with access to the firehose, but for the most part, the bot melee must be comprised of software agents that have been written to at some point explicitly follow my account.

Given the sheer number of bots now authoring tweets, I wonder how long Twitter would continue to function bot-to-bot if every human being on the planet stopped tweeting instantly with software agents posting links that other software agents would dereference and then reply to. In Battlestar Galactica the Cylons were big toaster-like robots but maybe our artificial overlords will show up in a much more subtle way. Let's just hope if that is the case that they end up being less self-promotional than their human progenitors when it comes to Twitter!