I’m currently toying around with some ideas for Twitter bots etc. so I had a look at some of the available gems out there. Sometimes Ruby makes stuff almost too simple… ;-) Here are a few nice snippets of what you could do with a couple of minutes time and some Ruby:

Automatically translate all tweets for a given keyword:

Daemonize the above:
Alternatively you can also follow a userid instead of a keyword and daemonize the whole thing, thus making it super easy to create a bot which posts translations of Matz’s tweets:

If you put this into a file like transbot.rb, the command ruby transbot.rb will give you all the regular daemon commands like start, stop, etc.

Ruby is trendy:
Curious of getting a list of current trends on Twitter, without hashtags? There you go:

Combining all these ideas you could easily write a bot that follows the current Twitter trends and posts translations of them in only a couple of lines. :-)