The Tache-O-Matic
Adding style and elegance to anyone's photos,
whether they want it or not.
Okay, I admit it: I'm behind Tache-O-Matic, a Twitter bot that takes recent photos from narcissistic photo-a-day web site DailyBooth, adds a comedy 'tache, and then @replies them to the original person.
The bot has 'tached hipsters taking photos in mirrors, dozens of Mac users sitting bored at their laptops, and many smiling partygoers. It's 'tached people of every description doing all sorts of things. It is, quite literally, a 'taching machine.
The Reactions
With a few notable exceptions, the reactions from the 'tached have been laughter; by now it's made more than a thousand people around the world smile. It turns out that adding mock-dignity through the medium of a comedy moustache is funny pretty much anywhere in the world.
By my count only three people have been offended by it, and in each case I've deleted the photograph and original tweet. In one of those cases, the bot then went on and — by the luck of the draw — 'tached another of their photos a few minutes later. I swiftly got rid of that too.
Twitter Bots
There are a decent number of Twitter bots; until recently, Yoda would reply to angry or afraid people, and there's a Dragonball Z character that replies to any mention of the number 9000. Twitter seems to have a high tolerance for them, as long as they're not actively spamming the system.
I've thought about creating a Twitter bot that would scan for people tweeting about suicidal thoughts and reply to them with links to help and support — but I can't find any way to distinguish that signal from the incredible amount of noise in the system.
How does it work?
Every few minutes, a script searches Twitter for Dailybooth pictures that have been posted since the last time the bot ran. It picks one, works out the location of the picture, and then sends that to the frankly spectacular Face.com face detection API.
If a face is found there – it has a fairly high false negative rate, but if it finds one it's generally very accurate – then the script downloads the picture itself, adds a 'tache from a selection of five to the first found face, uploads the result to Twitpic and then tweets about it.
My code is shonky as hell, but somehow it works. I'm indebted to Terence Eden for his fantastic Twitpic and OAuth howto; if you need to upload to Twitpic, use his method.
Moustache or Mustache?
American English removes the O from moustache — but, unlike the U in colour and humour, that's not a well-known fact. No matter which I used, the word isn't used in print often enough for the alternate spelling to become invisible to readers: it was going to attract more complaints about spelling than anything else.
So if you look closely, you'll notice that Tache-O-Matic itself never actually uses either word: it's always abbreviated to the uncontroversial 'tache.
Update: except that isn't uncontroversial either! Jenny from Indiana emailed me to say the normal abbreviation there would be 'stache. Ah well!
So what happens now?
I've slowed Tache-O-Matic's posting rate down dramatically; otherwise it would chew through all of DailyBooth's regular users in a couple of months. It'll continue, of course, and hopefully bring a smile — a 'tache — to a few people's faces every day.
And me? I'll carry on making stuff. Share your thoughts by email or Twitter; I'd love to hear from you. And if you post to Dailybooth, who knows? As Jeremy Beadle said: next time, the star of the show could be you.
