Monthly Archive for December, 2005

Page 2 of 2

Lots of bots!

Published on 4 years, 3 months ago in Windows Live Messenger. 3 Comments Tags: .

If you thought bots on MSN Messenger were fading away, think again. Bots for Encarta (encarta@conversagent.com), a MSN Gift Guide (msngiftguide@hotmail.com) and Amazon (chat@insidemessenger.com) have started appearing. Even SmarterChild (smarterchild@hotmail.com) is still alive, I thought it vanished many moons ago!

Now that MSN is taking bots seriously and authorizing them, quite a lot have popped up recently. Here is a list thanks to RTC News:

  • encarta@conversagent.com – A BOT that uses the Microsoft Encarta database to answer your questions and uses the activity window to provided you with more detailed rich content on the subject.
  • smarterchild@hotmail.com – A classic and very comprehensive chat BOT.
  • espbilly@msn.com – A quirky BOT that shows you videos, perhaps you’ll see your future?
  • yellowpagesdemo@hotmail.com – Yellow pages in IM. Find what you’re looking for near you.
  • msngiftguide@hotmail.com – Find the perfect holiday gift for that someone special.
  • blabla@chatman.nl – A Dutch chat BOT.
  • ibuddy077@lineage.co.kr – A BOT that talks about the Lineage game and has an interactive Activity.
  • indeedjobs@hotmail.com – Find that job that you’ve been looking for.
  • mindy@botmetro.net – A very good natural language chat BOT
  • chat@insidemessenger.com – Shop online with Amazon
  • bbcbackstage@hotmail.com – BBC tv listings

View the original post at RTC News, and the follow up.

I have also created a contact list file to import all the bots list above, download it here.

Windows Live Messenger gets smart

Published on 4 years, 3 months ago in Windows Live Messenger. Closed

Upon signing in this morning, I was greeted with the following in the info bar at the top of the contact list:

Connection problem

Clicking it took me to the Windows Live Messenger Help, explaining why I received the error. The contacts server is indeed having problems; it made four different unsuccessful attempts to fetch my contacts data. I wanted to see what would happen if I deleted the messenger cache in the temporary folder ‘MessengerCache’ (%TEMP%\MessengerCache\). Signing in again, I was greeted with no contacts (since the contact server is down and I have no cache from last time):

No contacts

What we can gather from this is Windows Live Messenger’s new method of storing and using contact data is completely independent from the messenger service, as we have also previously heard about the new Unified Contacts feature which keeps all your contact data in one place. This means you can have the same contacts in messenger, in your address book, on your phone, etc. and when one you change something in one place, you will see the changes everywhere else.

As I was having trouble connecting to the contacts service, I was seeing only my cache. Any changes made to my list would not be saved, because they can not be committed to the contacts service, as the info bar message says.

For those interested in the protocol, in the second scenario the ADL command looked like this as it had no contact data:

ADL 11 15
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