Every so often, the sun shines on Twitter.
Emoji Weather USA is just one of many bot-driven weather accounts on Twitter. However, this bot is a little special because it shows its forecast using only emoji.
Every six hours, the bots posts the weather forecast in the shape of the U.S. with emoji that corresponds to the climate in that portion of the country. The bot tweets for morning, afternoon, evening, and night, every single day.
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This bot didn't just fall from the sky, though. The account — and others just like it — are made and run by a guy from Lyon, France named Fabien Millet.
Millet tells Mashable that he was inspired by a tweet from France's own official weather agency Twitter account, Météo-France, on World Emoji Day in 2018. The tweet consisted of the shape of France made up by different weather-related emojis, like suns and umbrellas.
Thus began Millet's journey to create a custom Twitter bot, or a automized Twitter account that runs on Twitter's API.
"Having no knowledge of Twitter bot, and not having coded for many years, I found it to be a nice little challenge," Millet wrote via email. "To make this bot from scratch, I had to learn how to code in Javascript, how to make a Twitter bot, how to retrieve weather data via open APIs."
His first and most successful account is Tweetéo France (a play on Météo-France's username) in which two different bots tweet both weather and temperature reports. In addition to standard weather, he utilizes colored hearts, also in the shape of France, to signify varying temperatures. At the time of writing the account has about 10,900 followers.
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Millet says the account took off days after its launch. "It was really fun because people (and then companies) were using my France emoji map to make 'corrections' of it using their own emojis," he writes. Huge brands like Disneyland Paris and XBOX all took part in the Twitter craze based off of Millet's weather bot.
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Millet saw all the good feedback he was receiving and began to expand his small bot catalog as requests from followers poured in. Now, he's up to seven different emoji weather accounts, including the U.S., California, Denmark, EU, UK, and Japan. He's currently working on an eighth account, which is a similar concept with a different focus: air quality.
He says this new bot has an educational touch to it. "I try to raise awareness on an important and complex topic using a fun and easy to understand way to do it," he says of TweetAir, which focuses solely on his native France.
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Since scrolling Twitter can often inspire a stormy outlook for a lot of users, it's nice to know that someone is still looking on the bright side. Millet's own opinion of Twitter is quite sunny. He calls it "the best place to freely exchange with people and easily share what you like."
With Millet at the helm, we're predicting great things for the future of emoji weather reporting.
TopicsTwitter
