Hourly news flashes via IM
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 Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú 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 "bbcnewsflash@menti.name"
MSN users contact " bbcnewsflash@hotmail.co.uk"
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..).
A summary of suggestions received/ next steps includes...
- only showing headlines once (the current format is showing the news items most recently updated, so the same stories may re-appear if they've been updated, a little like hourly network news I guess)
- being able to select news categories/keywords you're interested in
- being able to specify the times you want to receive the news flashes, not just hourly
In addition, I found some weirdnesses with Google Talk, but am not sure if anyone else has. It doesn't always seem to deliver the news, while delivery to a more "standard" Jabber client/account seems to work as planned.
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