Best Buy Remix Developer Blog

Recently, developer Omar Abdelwahed has been working on a product look-up tool that combines the powerful Best Buy Remix API along wih the Twitter API. Omar has created an uber-cool application that allows you to look up items from the Best Buy product catalog using what he calls a 'Twitter bot'. Here's how to use it.

First and foremost you need a twitter account. You can do that easily by going here: Twitter Sign up ......ok great, now that you have a twitter account you will want to follow @BBYRemix by going to the BBYRemix twitter page and clicking on follow, or by sending the command "follow bbyremix" to Twitter. 

Next is to send @bbyremix a question. It needs to know a few things.
- that you want it to "find" something
- what kind of thing you want it to find
  - hardgoods (TVs, computers, appliances, furniture, and so on), abbreviated to "hard"
  - software, abbreviated to "soft"
  - music
  - movies
  - games
- the name of the thing
- where you want it to find that thing, if you are looking for a product at stores

The way Omar describes this in the documentation is: 

To query the Twitter bot, these calls must be made exactly as you see them: "@bbyremix find [category] [product name OR sku#] near [postal code, distance]"

Here is a sample query, diagrammed out:

In the query graphic above you will see that the message is directed @BBYRemix , then you see that 'find hard' is the product type; hardgoods. After product type the actual product is listed 'Xbox 360' followed by 'near 14226' a zipcode location, and finally by '25' the search area or distance around the zip code.

Here is the answer:

In just a few seconds I was alerted with a message back from the 'Twitter Bot' that the XBox 360 was available in my local area and it provided a link for more information. This is a great example of taking the information in Remix and making it generally available. Nice work, Omar.

--Keith