Personally, I have always thought IM bots are annoying, but in the past few weeks google has opened up to them and there are one or two useful ones out there, so without leaving your im window you can find out a bunch of good information. A website launched, and was later dugg, called imified.com that is going to be the basis for this post. 

Sign up here. Request an invite and then sign up with that (it only takes a few minutes for the invite to come, I don’t think they are screening them or anything right now)

After you do that you can start building your bot. Its super simple php, you just grab the msg from the user via the  line :

 $u = $_REQUEST['msg'];

and then you can do whatever you want with that msg. Right now I have a simple one running for bucketofawesome.com (add awesome@bot.im to your friends list to talk to ‘him’).

He really is just a test, but say hi, hello or howdy to get him started. If you follow the imified documentation you can get a few other details from the im, such as what visit # is this to your piece of code by this user. So you can step the user up the ladder depending on their visit. Then you can obviously reset that #, call back old messages from the user, etc…

If you really wanted to (though documentation is only for their side of the project) you could integrate this into a current cms to make it interact different ways for different users, and verify a user account etc…

Mine right now is just a series of if statements… if one thing is said do this… and if the user types the word ‘new’ it pulls the newest 3 articles from BoA, sends the list to the user, and if the user sees a title he hasn’t seen before, he can click the accompanying link to take him/her to the homepage.

Honestly, I can imagine my code getting really advanced and doing some cool things, checking to see if there are new updates since their last visit, OR you can even push messages to your im followers via HTTP Post if you wanted to update like a tweet when you post something new.

There are limitations though…. and most of those are on the side of the instant messenging program. HTML doesn’t really work beyond <br> (at least in gmail) so links are a pain … having to type out the whole thing obscures the rest of the text and makes it ugly. However, i think it has some cool potential if you have some good ideas for it.

If someone can help me with some stuff, I want to make a dreamincode one, I just need some help with particular sections. Comment below.

**Note : imified.com was recently dugg and had about 24 hours of downtown because they got hit at a perilous time between site chnages and a couple other worst case scenarios. getting your registration approved may take more time than normal right now.