Origins & Progression

After I finished my 1700 word poetry essay for AP English Lang, I found myself with some free time to spare. It was 7:30 and I told myself that I would resume my work as soon as the clock hit 8:30.

At first, I wanted to create a simple command line program that would tell you who your “twitter crushes” were (A.K.A People that favorited/retweeted the most). I had ulterior motives behind that but that’s another story. Anyways, the “twitter crush” program failed because twitter wouldn’t let me have access to the list of people who favorited/retweeted a tweet. That sucked. So, I decided to go for something simpler: mean calculations. The concept was pretty simple. The program would take a username and calculate the average favorite/retweet count. Easy. After all, calculating averages is a program that computer science students do on their 2nd week of schooling.

Only 20 actual minutes of my time was used to actually write the program. 10–15 were spent doing research. I tweeted a teaser photo of the finished product because I thought the implications would be interesting. Still, I’m still wildly impressed at the response it received. People flooded my mentions asking to have me send them their stats. It was overwhelming and cost me time that could have been used for studying.

So, I decided to spend some time the next day on turning my simple program into an automated twitter bot. I’m not ashamed to admit that I drew out elaborate plans in class. The best part is that I actually executed each part of my plan to perfection. Set up took a bit to get under control but in 3 hours, I had a final working product. Wilbur was born.

Thoughts & Reflections

What’s fascinating to me is that Wilbur was not very hard to write. Overall, the file that powers Wilbur is only 57 lines long. Heck, it would be shorter if I went ahead and optimized my code. That’s what baffles me: The program is wildly simple yet has garnered so much attention. Why is this?

Was it because of the cutesy marketing? I must say I was proud of the cutesy little avatar I gave Wilbur. That might have been part of the appeal but no that wasn’t it. What made it so popular was that it was personalized and quantitative. Users can see their own personal results measured in pure hard cold numbers. It gives users bragging rights over others. I could easily discuss how egotistical twitter users are but I’ll refrain.

More importantly, Wilbur was easy to use. The concept is simple: @ WilburBot and ask him for your stats. Within a minute or two, Wilbur would process your request and spit out an answer to you. Simple. Quick. Easy.

Wilbur is not even the most complex program I’ve written. But it is the most popular program I’ve released. That’s very exciting to me.

I love computers. I love programming. I’ve always had a love for computer science so I wouldn’t say that Wilbur ignited a spark. Instead, I’d like to think that Wilbur fueled the flames to what was already a wildfire of epic proportions. God bless you Wilbur.