This quick tutorial will show you how
to develop your own functional IM bot that works with Google Talk,
Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Live and all other popular instant
messaging clients.
To get started, all you need to know are some very basic
programming skills (any language would do) and web space to host your
“bot”.
For this example, I have created a dummy bot called “insecure”
that listens to your IM messages. To see this live, add
insecure@bot.im to your GTalk buddy list and start
chatting.
If you like to write a personal IM bot, just follow these simple
steps:-
Step 1: Go to www.imified.com
and register a new account with a bot.
Step 2: Now it’s time to create a bot which is
actually a simple script that resides on your public web server. It
could be in PHP, Perl, Python or any other language.
Example Hello World bot: The example below
illustrates just how easy it is to create a bot. This example is
coded in PHP.
<?php
switch ($_REQUEST['step']) { case
1: echo "Hi, what's your name?"; break; case
2: echo "Hi " . $_REQUEST['value1'] . ", where do
you live?"; break; case 3: echo "Well, welcome to
this hello world bot, " . $_REQUEST['value1'] . "<br>from
" . $_REQUEST['value2'] . ".<reset>"; break; }
?>
Step 3: Once your script is ready, put it
somewhere on your web server and copy the full URL to the clipboard.
Step 4: Now login to your imified account, paste
the script URL
Step 5: Add
that im bot your friends list. That’s it.
This is a very basic bot but the possibilities are endless.
For instance, you could write a bot that will send an email to all
your close friends via a simple IM message. Or you could write one
that will does currency conversion.