These bots are delivering cats, dogs, and more from the New York Public Library's archives to Twitter
A new pair of “cat” and “dog” bots on Twitter are doing something much more wonderful than tweeting just pictures of cats and dogs.
Meet the aptly named NYPL Cats and NYPL Dogs, two bots built by Ashley Blewer, who’s an Applications Developer at the New York Public Library. Cats is older than dogs by a couple of weeks, but they’ve both been around for a bit over a month and both tweet 4 times a day. Here’s how each bot sprang into existence:
But, this is what their tweets normally look like:
The images only partially embed (as links, so you have to click on individual tweets to see a snippet), but they’re well worth digging through. They’re especially fun to explore since the bots are pulling from images in NYPL’s digital collection that include the words “dog” or “cat” in their title, which means that while often the bots spit out images of cats or dogs like these: