Sbot: Perform Google, Yahoo, Bing & Twitter search right from your IM

We perform lot of searches on the web everyday using search engines. Most of the time we use Google, sometimes it’s just not enough & we try others like Bing. So, myself & the100rabh came up with an idea to provide access to multiple search engines right from IM. We built an IM Search Bot, which we call “sbot” which is always available for you in your IM to perform searches.

Sbot supports Google, Bing, Yahoo! & Twitter search right now. Just add Sbot as your buddy on Gtalk/Y! Messenger/Live Messenger & start using it!!

Google Talk – sbot@bot.im
Yahoo Messenger – searchbot@ymail.com
MSN Live Messenger - searchbot@live.com

Once Sbot is added to your IM Buddy list, just start conversing with it. To start with send “help” & bot responds with usage instructions.

• To perform Google search send g<space>search term
• To perform Bing search send b<space>search term
• To perform Yahoo search send y<space>search term
• To perform Twitter search send t<space>search term

I use Sbot more when I’m at work since I don’t like to open too many tabs in the browser at work. One more really good usage of Sbot is Twitter Search! Whenever I’m busy, I use sbot to check my replies by just sending a message “t @hnprashanth”, simple!!

We are open for suggestions to add more search engines & features to sbot, please drop them in comments section.

Search Bot is built using Imified

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When I switched my email ID, I switched my Gtalk ID also. I don’t wanted to use the old ID just for IM. But how to tell everyone about it? My friends list on Gtalk is very huge! I Googled for available options to set auto responder for my old ID. I come across answer.im which just does the job but went down after just few hours. Then I found another desktop application to set auto responder, but this works only when your computer is on. So, I wasn’t satisfied with both of them.

Imified is a free service which provides you hosted IM bots. User can write it’s behavior  in his favorite server side language like PHP. So, following are few things you must know/have to complete this Auto Responder Bot:

• Imified account, off course you can get one at imified.com if you don’t have.
• Web Space to put your IM end point script (Ex: PHP File). There are few free hosting providers which you can make use of.
• Knowledge of a server side scripting language, not must, but if you know, you can add more functionality. I will give the basic PHP code in this tutorial.

Now that you have an Imified account, create a new bot clicking on “Create New Bot”. Give your bot a name & select a bot.im ID, both of these are not important since you are going to use this for personal use on your existing Gtalk/MSN/Yahoo/AIM ID. But “Bot URL” is important here, you need to specify end point script file path which will be accessed whenever somebody pings your ID. In my case, I placed this file at http://prashanth.net/bot.php.

Once your Bot is created, you can see options to add other networks at the bottom. Select the network which you want to set the auto responder, here I am opting for Gtalk. Just enter username, password, nickname and click activate.

Now your bot is active, but we haven’t created our end point script yet, so bot still don’t know what to respond if somebody pings it! So the basic PHP script for auto responder is as follows (which is placed at http://prashanth.net/bot.php) :

<?php

echo “Hey, I am no longer available on this ID. Please add me as prashanth@prashanth.net on your Gtalk to chat with me. Thanks, Prashanth”;

?>

Just open a text editor, like notepad, copy/paste the above code & save it as bot.php, upload it to your server. Make sure you upload it to the same path you gave to Imified in Bot URL field. This is very basic script to enable auto responder, I guess which is just enough. Imified passes various variables to this page through GET which you can make use of to write more interactive auto responder. Go through Imified API documentation for more on it.

So our always ON (24X7!!!) auto responder is up!

Update: As Adam said in comment section, user need not to use any scripting language until unless he wants to make use of variables passed by the Bot. So, for this purpose, we can simply use a text (.txt) file instead of PHP.

I recently acquired the domain prashanth.net, there’s no domain left with this name since it’s a very common name in South India. And also blame it on Tamil Star Prashanth So, one & a half year running backorder finally accomplished the domain. Now what!!? Since the domain is really good, I wanted all my stuff to come under it! I started learning jQuery & built a pretty neat home page for prashanth.net. Moved my personal blog to this domain & made the previous domain to redirect here (permanent, wildcard).  These were all initial setup. One of the main reasons for buying this domain was having a nice email ID which stands out!

Google Apps Registration:

There’s no better option than Google Apps account which comes for free (Standard Edition). I registered the domain with Google Apps account & did all initial setup of creating MX records to make email to work.

Email, IM Migration:

Since I wanted a complete shift to this new ID from my Gmail, I wanted to move all my mails for future refernce. I setup the mail fetcher which is available under “Settings–>Accounts–>Get mail from other accounts”. This mail fetcher copied all mails from my gmail ID to new Google Apps account, though it took few days! Similarly moved contacts with Import & Export options which gmail has.  Once email gets activated, it automatically activates IM. You can use Google Talk to connect with all other people who are on Gmail or Google Apps account. I couldn’t tell everyone on my Google Talk about my migration to new personalized ID. I used answer.im to auto respond those who try to contact me on my old gmail ID. Answer.im makes you look online all the time & when somebody pings, it replies with the message you have set.

Docs, Calendar & Custom URL:

Google Apps account also comes with other services from Google, Docs & Calendar. So all these services looks more personalized when you have custom URLs. Setting up custom URLs is very simple, you just need to change it in Google Apps service settings & create appropriate CNAME records on your domain. It might sound a bit geeky, but nothing once you know how to do it. So with Google Apps services & custom URLs, I actually got the following:

Mail: http://mail.prashanth.net

Calendar: http://cal.prashanth.net

Docs: http://docs.prashanth.net

Life looks so simple & organized now! And also gives personalization touch to it! Beleive it or not, I don’t have a office suite installed on my computers. I am a fulltime user of Google Docs! Docs also provides offline access to all your documents on it. All you have to do is enable offline access (requirs Google Gears installed). You can access, modify all your docs even when not connected to internet & all the changes you have made get syncronized when you connect next time.

Syncing with Mobile Phone:

I have Nokia E66, Symbian S60 3rd edition phone. I use System Seven push email service to receive emails in real time. System Seven recently launched syncing contacts & calendar with Gmail/Google Apps. With that my phone’s calendar is always in sync with my online calendar. It doesn’t matter whether I add an event on mobile’s calendar or my google calendar, it gets reflected everywhere.

Google has released Google talk labs edition with lot of new features. The most awaited group chat is implemented in this labs edition. Group chat was implemented on gmail web chat app few months ago, but it’s desktop application was lacking this feature. Following are new features found on Google talk labs edition:

• Group chat, have conferences in Gtalk desktop labs edition. I used to log in to Yahoo! for this feature before.
• Notification from other Google services orkut & calendar.
• Tabbed chatting, no hassle of new chat window, chat with different friends in different tabs.

There are also few things which I don’t like in this new client:

• Installation is different from previous client, is pretty similar to Yahoo! messenger. First downloads a 300kb installer, upon executing that will download other required files to install application. This installer may not work at office, because they might be blocking the port through which installer tries to connect to server.
• One more much awaited feature “Invisible Mode” is not yet implemented.
• Copying of text from chat window is not possible! This looks really annoying for me.

You can get Google Talk labs edition here. This is the labs edition, you can click on “Feedback” button present at bottom of application to send your feedback about the application & to improve next Google talk release.

Yahoo Messenger can be used withoutht downloading huge file & installing it.You can try Yahoo Web Messenger @ http://messenger.yahoo.com/webmsgr/fmsgr.php. But sometimes this does’t work properly.Its completely not working in my system.
Another better way is www.e-messenger.net which is very good.In this site you can also use MSN Messenger.These messengers are not fully functional as normal one.But its good for chatting purpose.This will be helpfull to working people where they don’t have privilages or permissions to install any programs

You can add emotions in Gmail chat,
List of emotions are present at
Gmail Help.