Unofficial AIM Bot Gives Infocom Classics IM Twist

Fluidic Binary writes "Now instant messenging can waste our time in exciting 'new' ways, according to Wired News, who reveal that an improved unofficial AIM bot has been created to play Infocom games via AOL's messenging client. According to the article: 'The bot, designed by 26-year-old Web programmer Andy Baio, is a Perl script that acts as an intermediary between the games, which are hosted on his server, and AOL's network.'"

Comments

Re:Slashdotted?

[Psychor]

Oh, for the curious who can't be bothered to read the link, you want to be connecting to AIM usernames infocombot, infocombot2 or infocombot3. Don't expect a quick response though (ICQ works for this as well as AIM, or your favourite multiple network messaging client).

Too bad rate-limitting kills it

[kriston]

Too bad the built-in rate-limitting in the AIM service kills this. The Smarterchild people had the same problem so they had to get special accounts that weren't rate-limitted.

For those who use these services, rate-limitting is that which prevents you from sending too many instant messages too quickly, and too many instant messages to too many recipients too quickly. The servers penalize you for the more messages you send until you can't carry on a conversation, and then they time out and the rate-limitting wears off. This happens in both the oscar protocols and in the TOC protocols used by things like the Minitik project. The rate limits do not wear off when you sign-off, either.