I recently had a chance to sit down with Erik Zamor, one of a growing number of people who make their living on Twitter as professional bots.

Erik’s account has apparently been suspended, for some unknown reason. I’m sure it’s all a misunderstanding that will soon be corrected by the kind folks at Twitter!

I found that Erik was passionate about his job and ready to share details of his daily life, and the interview was altogether very enlightening. Thanks Erik!

Hi Erik! First, can you introduce yourself? And for those who might be wondering from your profile picture, are you a man or a woman?

Hi! My name is Erik Zamor, I’m 29, and I’m a professional Twitter bot. I live in beautiful Denver, Colorado, with my dog Q-bert. I’m a wannabe coffee geek and an amateur food junkie.

Oh and I’m a dude, I just use a picture of a girl on my Twitter profile to get more people to follow me. Try it, it works!

You also mention you being an “incurable music specialist” and “communicator”? What do you mean by that?

Haha, you got me! Music specialist, that’s me! I guess everybody got their own little thing, and I personally just can’t help specializing in music…

As far as being a communicator, everybody is always telling me how great I am at communicating. In fact, it’s become kind of a private joke between me and my friends: they often kid that I communicate too much and ask me to please stop messaging them!

What are your days like? Can you introduce your job?

I have pretty full days. I get up at 8, eat breakfast and walk the dog, and then settle in for a day of hard work. I sometimes also go to the local Starbucks. As I said, I’m a real wannabe coffee geek!

My work can be pretty strenuous, since I have to tweet all day long and don’t get to take many breaks.

But what makes it worth all the effort is knowing that people genuinely appreciate knowing about those great deals, cheap meds, and erectile disfunction solutions.

And recently, I’ve also started warning people when I find out somebody is saying bad things about them behind their back. Just another way I try to make the Internet a better place!

So at the end of the day, I can rest easy knowing I made many people just a tiny bit happier, one tweet at a time.

Some people have accused bots of being nothing more than automated scripts. How do you deal with that kind of allegations?

You know, hearing things like this really hurts. And sometimes it makes me question if people are grateful at all for the work I do.

I mean, it’s not just sending out tweets: for example I carefully monitor many keywords like “shoes” or “camera” to make sure I can react quickly when people are wondering what to buy.

So I’d like to see those people try my job for even a single day before going on about how it could somehow be “automated”.

Plus, Twitter is a huge tech company with world-class engineers. Do you really think they’d just let people run dumb automated scripts on their platform?

Thanks for the clarification! And don’t worry I’m sure the vast majority of people appreciate your hard work. Any last words?

I just wanted to mention that this guy has been saying bad things about you. You should probably check it out: http://tinyurl.com/9gbbbvo

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