[backstage] Hourly news flashes via IM

[Mario Menti]

Another late night, another IM bot...

Someone suggested off-line it would be nice to have an IM bot that pushes news to them automatically, without you having to request it. So I sat down last night and implemented something like this (pretty raw in its current state):

- you contact the bot to register you interest
- the bot sends out the latest 5 headlines from the BBC news page every hour (on the hour) to all those registered
- and of course, you can contact the bot again to remove yourself from the list

If anyone wants to try it out and let me know what they think, here's the details:

Google Talk and Jabber users, contact "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
MSN users contact " [EMAIL PROTECTED]"
AIM users contact "bbcnewsflash"

As I said, this is still very experimental, so don't be too surprised if it doesn't always work... but I'd be interested in people's feelings in general, whether something like this is useful (or just annoying..).

One obivous next step would be to be able to select the type of news you want (currently it's just the 5 items most recently updated in UK version of the news feed) by registering keywords, or being able to pick news by category.

Cheers,
Mario.