I haven’t gotten around to watching the Fox TV series “Ghosted,” but maybe I shouldn’t bother — one of the show’s stars, Adam Scott, just removed it from his Twitter bio on Friday.
A new bot snitches on how your Twitter friends are changing their bios
Spoonbill is a must-have tool for journalists and other overly nosy people.
Sam Greenwood / Getty
I learned this thanks to a new service called Spoonbill. Every day, it sends me an email with a rundown of the changes the people I follow on Twitter have made to their bios, names and locations. It’s a readable digest of how people are choosing to present themselves to the public, which is fascinating for a nosy so-and-so like me.
Extremely loyal readers of Recode may be thinking, “This sounds familiar!” They’re right: Back in 2014, we wrote about a similar service called Bio Is Changed that also sent email alerts when people you follow changed their bios.
However, that service shut down in late 2016 and its website now suggests you check out a site called “Find Peace With God.” Hmm, maybe I’ll bookmark that one; I have some important tweets to send first.
Spoonbill creator Justin Duke told Recode that Spoonbill currently has a “healthy” number of users “under ten thousand,” which he’s happy with.
“One thing I’m very heartened by, though, is the strength of the open and clickthrough rates of the emails as well as how many folks stay subscribed to the emails over time,” he said in an email. “I tried to build it to be as un-annoying as possible.”
Some of Duke’s favorite Twitter bios that he has tracked are the novelty/”Weird Twitter” icon @dril — whose changes are good for “pure entertainment value” — and the podcasting company @GimletMedia, which has changed its bio over time to catalogue how many shows it produces.
Personally, my favorite bio to watch over the past few days has been that of “Selma” and “13th” director Ava DuVernay. Her film adaptation of the Madeleine L’Engle novel “A Wrinkle In Time” is due out soon, and DuVernay has been workshopping (or perhaps just playing around with) how best to describe what it means to her:
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
