MattFacts™ Post Mortem

This April’s Fool’s Day, inspired by the classic prank, Cat Facts, I decided to create a SMS chatbot that would spam people with “Matt Facts“. I don’t normally do much pranking, but this seemed like a good opportunity to build a silly little chatbot and have a bit of harmless fun.

What People Said

The responses were definitely varied, some were definitely nonplussed:

Others were bemused:

One or two were impressed:

A few were delighted:

And more than one person fell for the fake-unsubscribe trap:

How I Did It

I actually created the MattFact™ chatbot back in early February, so I’ve been itching to unleash it upon my unsuspecting friends…

The setup was pretty simple, it only took one evening to whip up. I created an account on Twilio, funded it with $20 (it ended up costing me less than $10 in credit), and used their example for sending and receiving SMS messages as a basis. The only technical “catch” was that when you text the Twilio number, it sends a HTTP Post request to a webhook. However, I don’t really have any DNS / static IP set up at home. To make this work, I simply used ngrok to get a public URL for my local node.js server.

The whole app is on GitHub here: https://github.com/MattFoy/MattFacts