Great idea! I looks like XMPP services are getting more and more popular, and it's a great thing.
I love the bot provided by Producteev to manager your tasks, it's way more convenient than having to open your browser, login to the website, clicking in the right place.
I hope to see more services allowing it's user to interact via a bot.
Chat bots are a lot of fun. Google App Engine handles incoming instant messages just like other web requests, so developing a chat bot for App Engine is quite similar to developing any other webapp.
On a side note, if you are looking to develop a bot using a standard HTTP service hosted anywhere using any language (not just Python and Java) with a better domain name (@bot.im as compared to @appspot.com), you could try http://www.imified.com/
The good thing about appengine though is that everything is so well integrated that you don't really have to look to piecing together the parts.
Names are important. Putting aside that "DuckDuckGo" itself is still an odd naming choice, this choice isn't much better, considering the blog post mistypes it too:
> DuckDuckGo chat bot: im@ddg.gg
> DuckDuckGo now has a chat bot at im@ddd.gg that will respond [...]
>"DuckDuckGo" itself is still an odd naming choice
I think what makes the name weird is that it interjects not zero, not one, but TWO hard sounds ("ck") in the middle of the name. It requires 5 movements to speak it out loud (Du-ck-Du-ck-Go), as oppossed to 2 (Goo- Gel). One has to be careful with adding hard sounds into the middle of product names.
It's not the "ck" sound that makes it difficult/slow; it's the "ck" followed immediately by the "d". Both sounds are stops, and stops are somewhat difficult to produce consecutively.
Compare with a name like "Conoco", which contains the same sound that you were complaining about in DuckDuckGo twice as well, but is much easier to say because both occurrences of it are preceded and followed by vowels.
> Node.js is ideal for such routing/switching based interactions where it takes data from one end, pumps it to the other and does the reverse.
I've been intrigued by node.js since it comes up on HN so much, but this has really got me interested as this describes exactly a portion of a project I'm working on right now. In my case, the data would be copious and binary rather than instant message text -- anyone know if node.js is performant enough to handle that case?
I would be interested in knowing the results of your findings. So, from my brief understanding of node.js, it's well suited for such stuff. There's special handling in node for binary data. The answer probably depends on whether you want to blindly shuffle data (piping) or do something smart like interpret it, etc...
A small experiment (profiled) which emulates your use-case would surely throw some light on the question.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 44.1 ms ] threadI love the bot provided by Producteev to manager your tasks, it's way more convenient than having to open your browser, login to the website, clicking in the right place.
I hope to see more services allowing it's user to interact via a bot.
For more info on App Engine's XMPP integration:
http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/xmpp/overview.h...
And my shameless self-plug:
http://social-butterfly.appspot.com/
The good thing about appengine though is that everything is so well integrated that you don't really have to look to piecing together the parts.
I think what makes the name weird is that it interjects not zero, not one, but TWO hard sounds ("ck") in the middle of the name. It requires 5 movements to speak it out loud (Du-ck-Du-ck-Go), as oppossed to 2 (Goo- Gel). One has to be careful with adding hard sounds into the middle of product names.
Compare with a name like "Conoco", which contains the same sound that you were complaining about in DuckDuckGo twice as well, but is much easier to say because both occurrences of it are preceded and followed by vowels.
>DuckDuckGo now has a chat bot at im@ddd.gg
Apparently the domain name even confuses the author
Note it is also at im@duckduckgo.com
Wish I had realized this 10 years ago.
I've been intrigued by node.js since it comes up on HN so much, but this has really got me interested as this describes exactly a portion of a project I'm working on right now. In my case, the data would be copious and binary rather than instant message text -- anyone know if node.js is performant enough to handle that case?
A small experiment (profiled) which emulates your use-case would surely throw some light on the question.
Please add another alias, like ddg or duck. You're showing up as "im" in my buddies list, and frankly, that's not very informative to me.
EDIT: Never mind, I guess I can rename you on my end.