@answersonly

hi jay - thanks for your comments :)

in answer to your question, they're actually chosen randomly & are "live" in the sense that they are actively being scraped from the yahoo answers website a few times an hour. i like this approach as opposed to hand-picking them because i myself watch this twitter feed like television & can be surprised and amused by the dangling, non-sequitir answers without questions like "Who cares!! 1944???" or "How drunk were you? Really? Just admit that you enjoyed it and move on." good advice!

twitter is an interesting & fertile little app i think. with just a little bit of python (or some third party tool like twitterfeed.com) it's almost trivial to use as a publishing format for generative or otherwise automated work, it provides a fun constraint in the form of the 140-character limit to keep you from taking yourself too seriously, and most importantly it has a very messy & complicated context at the intersection of online self-publishing and "social networking". for example, this feed of weirdo decontextualized text snippets has 9 "friends", and these friendships are being formed directly in the place where @answersonly lives&plays.

the last twitter-based piece i did (with nicholas o'brien) was taken down by twitter after a few hours (it was also waay more obnoxious), but jonCates wrote a bit about it here: http://joncates.blogspot.com/2009/01/i-know-lol-jake-elliott-nicholas-obrien.html . basically, that piece ('@iknow_lol') would search for tweets containing the string "LOL" and reply to them with an affirmative "I know, LOL!" in its short lifespan, @iknow_lol acquired at least 5 or 6 friends who saw that it was talking to them and wanted to get personal. despite what twitter called "spammy" behavior, i think @iknow_lol was a pretty cool/absurd detournement of the "social networking". hopefully people will figure out ways to build social network sculptures like this without being banned :)