For years I’ve tried to create “AIM bots” little buddies you’d add to your instant message list – to interact with, to fetch useful information and deliver via your IM window. Back in the day there was a company called ActiveBuddy and they a great developer kit so you could make your own too (not sure if that’s still possible). As of today AOL has a new effort here so I think we might see a few interesting ones. Ideally, these bots could use RSS and anyone with a feed could create their own bots that their visitors could add and use. Would you use a MAKE bot? You could ask it “how do i solder” and it he’d return text and links to our pages on this online and in the magazine… [via].
6 thoughts on “Make AOL Instant Message bots?”
Comments are closed.
ADVERTISEMENT
Support Make:
Join Make: Community Today
Join Make: Community Today
Release 7.0 of ColdFusion added several different IM Event Gateways that make creating IM based bots extremely simple. The developer version of ColdFusion is free and can be downloaded from macromedia.com. The ColdFusion community has already released several bots, including one for use in looking up ColdFusion documentation (try cflivedocs in Yahoo Messenger for example).
Here is a program that eases bot creation:
http://www.duncanlamb.com/sdba/
It’s called SDBA. I used it a little over a year ago and found it very easy to make bots. It can work with databases, web services and it can do screen scraping and other non-trivial tasks.
It works on Windows, Linux and others and it interfaces with AIM, MSN, Yahoo and other protocols. It’s based on perl and has examples that you can customize, which is what I did.
Any Python progg’ers should check out Py-TOC. I’ve written a couple of bots in it; it’s not very hard to do if you’re familiar with Python. And using a full programming language lets you do stuff that you wouldn’t be able to do otherwise.