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“Pepito is back”: on Twitter with the help of a bot, seven years are watching the cat go away and return home

Thousands of users wish Pepito good walks and are afraid that one day he will not come back.

In July 2011, the Parisian engineer Clément Storck created a twitter account for his cat named Pepito. In the microblog, he tracks the movements of his pet with a camera and a bot. They fix when the animal leaves and comes home through a special door. Seven years later, more than 60 thousand people watch daily cat movements.

Stork said that the idea came to him during the development of the site of notifications for the “Internet of things”. Then he made a door for Pepito and decided on the example of a cat to show the work of the service. Every time a pet goes for a walk – the algorithm takes a photo and sends a message to “Twitter” “Pepito left” with the exact time. The same on returning, only with the text “Pepito returned.”


Pepito was born in 2007. A cat can go out for a walk several times a couple of hours, and can stay at home for days. Usually, the bot sends monotonous images of the animal, but sometimes something changes.

According to Clement, he wants to automate most things in his life. The Frenchman has a device that understands when he goes to bed, and turns off the lights and music in the house. When the developer returns home, the system detects it and reports the temperature in the room.

The owner of the cat noted that he did not expect such popularity of microblogging about the walks of Pepito. In June 2017, the animal habitually went out for a walk, but the bot did not report for a day or two about his return. This caused panic among Pepito’s subscribers.

 

“I did my part searching”

As a result, Clement had to explain that the cat was not lost, but slept at home – he just used another door to return from a walk, so the system did not record anything. According to the Frenchman, there were other cases of user anxiety: for example, the pet “lost” for several days, although he simply refused to go out because of the heat.

Subscribers Pepito formed a tradition: every time a tweet “Pepito came out” they asked him to be more careful and quickly return. And they are very much afraid that someday the cat will not return home for some reason.


“Come back, please”

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