Develop your own functional IM bot

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

Screen Name:hackingalltricks@im bot
Bot Script URL: http://hackingalltricks.blogspot.in/

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.