Task complete

If it hasn’t already happened by the time you read this, it will happen soon: @everyword‘s seven-year mission to tweet “every word in the English language” has come to an end. I hope you’ve all enjoyed the ride!

My plan is to write a more complete post-mortem on the project later. In the mean time, this post contains some links to things that followers of @everyword might find interesting or useful.

The future of @everyword

But first, a word about what’s next for @everyword. Don’t unfollow just yet! My plan at the moment is to let the account rest for a bit, and then run “@everyword Season 2,” starting over from the beginning of the alphabet. Before I do that, I’d like to find a more thorough word list, and also do some programming work so that the bot is less likely to experience failures that interrupt service.

Writing about @everyword

Here’s some writing about @everyword, by me and others.

Writing about Twitter bots

@everyword is a Twitter bot—an automated agent that makes Twitter posts. There are a lot of interesting Twitter bots out there. Here’s some interesting writing by and about bot-makers:

What to follow

Here are some Twitter bots that I think followers of @everyword might enjoy.

Thank you!

The response to @everyword has been overwhelming. When I started the project in 2007, I never would have dreamed that the account would one day have close to 100k followers. And if you’re one of those followers, thank you! It’s a great feeling to have made something that so many people have decided to make a daily (or, uh, half-hourly) part of their lives.

I view @everyword as a success, and I want to note here that I owe this success to all of my friends and family who encouraged me along the way and helped to make @everyword a topic of conversation. I am very bad at finding value in the things I make, and I’m especially bad at self-promotion. Without the help of the people close to me, I’m sure that @everyword would have completed its task in obscurity—if it completed its task at all.

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