Build Your own IM Bot with Zimbie
October 25th, 2007 (11:00am) Mike Gunderloy 2 Comments
Being connected these days means you have many ways of getting information: email, text message, Growl notification on a Mac, “toast” popups on Windows, visiting a Web site, RSS feeds…and instant messages. Sometimes it seems like there’s an army of developers out there intent on putting plumbing into place so that all of these channels can be interconnected at will. A recent entrant to the interconnectivity sweepstakes is Zimbie, who offer the promise of easy instant message “bot” development.
While the potential of building your own IM bot may not be immediately obvious, I think it helps to see it in the context of information management. For example, they offer a pre-built Zimbot that can monitor a RSS feed and make it available via IM. So, if you have, say, a critical build server that makes results available via RSS, you can use Zimbie to translate those results into an IM bot that you follow. Whenever there’s a new build result, you’ll get a message, via GTalk (or Adium or Miranda or whatever other client you use to follow such things). This is a way to make the most important RSS feeds on your list more visible, bringing them to your attention more quickly.
To use Zimbie, you need to download and run their client on a Windows PC. Then you add bots to it. Each bot needs its own account on a Jabber server (you can use Google Talk or another Jabber server), and is controlled by an XML file. The XML file allows the bot to recognize incoming messages and respond to them via simple matching, regular expression matching, or even by running external JavaScript scripts - there’s an extensive manual of examples to master if you want to create your own bots.
Right now, Zimbie has the example RSS-to-IM bot to get you started, as well as some other simple examples. They promise more pre-built bots in the future, presumably as they exit the beta period. The service is middling complex to set up at the moment, but if you’re a developer you shouldn’t have any particular trouble getting started with it. Assuming that you have a PC with Windows and an always-on connection handy, this is an easy way to push just about any information over to instant messages.
2 Comments Post your own comment
Adam Kalsey says: October 25th, 2007 2:35pm
Zimbie looks like a great way to get into bots. If you need a bot for your personal usage for some simple tasks, Zimbie looks like it might be easier than writing your own Jabber code.
Shameless plug… If you don’t happen to have a Windows PC that’s always running, or if you want to build bots for your customers to use, using any programming language, and connecting to multiple networks, come talk to us at IMified. http://imified.com/developers/
Kieran O'Sullivan says: November 7th, 2007 4:42am
Hi, thanks for the great mention. just to let your readers know we will have the beta support for the MSN protocol ready within a few days. Also just to clarify Adam’s comment, the instance of Zimbie that has any bots deployed to it will of course have to be on a PC that is always running just like any server. (Mac version is currently being tested). But any end users of this service (people that add the bot to their buddy list) obviously do not have to be on always running machines. In the case of the free RSS buddy this will detect the user’s online presence and begin to check for new feeds for them as soon as they are available.
kieran.