The Birthday Bot
Automating my personal contacts CRM long before AI made this easy: Extracting birthdays from social networks and address books, then sending personalized birthday wishes on autopilot.
Long before the AI era, I built my own personal contacts CRM with scripts and clever automation. Across social networks and address books like Google Contacts, I fully automated the extraction of birthdays for everyone in my network.
On the day itself, a script generated and sent a birthday message at a random time, fully automatically. The message was dynamic in form and tone, formal or casual depending on the relationship, and even picked the right channel, Xing or Facebook, for each contact.
And on my own birthday, a companion script handled the flood of incoming wishes: It replied to every message automatically, individually, and depending on what was actually written to me.
What it did
Automated birthday extraction from social networks and address books
Randomly timed, auto-generated birthday messages
Dynamic tone: Formal or casual, matched per contact
Channel-aware sending, e.g. Xing or Facebook
Automatic, personalized replies to incoming birthday wishes