What if President Obama and Sonic the Hedgehog mind-melded to create one public statement? Perhaps it would sound something like this:
This message is the end result of a site called Tweet Mashup. It works by combining various tweets from two accounts of your choosing into one, mostly conversational tweets. If you’re shy of a few ideas, Tweet Mashup is happy to get you started with popular mashups of accounts like Neil deGrasse Tyson and Emo Kylo Ren, Selena Gomez and Elizabeth Windsor, or Lin-Manuel Miranda and Pizza Cat.
Tweet Mashup is the brainchild of Jonathan Adler, a data scientist based in Seattle. His name might sound familiar to reality TV show fans — Adler won the third and final season of King of the Nerds, in which a proclaimed geeks competed for a cash prize. He now spends most of his days working on mathematical analysis, but Twitter bots are a favored side-project.
“This is the first one of my weird creations that took off,” Adler tells The Verge. “It’s scary! I just made this in my free time on a little server, and suddenly it’s getting overwhelmed with traffic. It feels like a lot of responsibility. But also it’s great to see how much fun people are having with it.”
Adler says the site has already wracked up more than 100K views and over 50K unique Twitter handles. Throughout the day, it’s struggled to load under the surge of interest.