If any of you use AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) then when you signed on this morning you were probably welcomed with a message stating you had a new buddy group added with various bots that were now available.
I wasn’t too worried about it initially, or more accurately didn’t think too much about it. However, I just played around with the MoviePhone one and it’s actually pretty slick. They work pretty much like this:
- Double-click the bot’s name in your buddy list
- Message the bot with the name of the movie you’re interested in
- Enter the # of the response of the movie you’re interested in seeing (Seinfeld episode, “Why don’t you just tell me the name of the movie you’d like to see!” – Kramer)
- Enter your zip code (the 2nd time I used it, it remembered my zip and asked me if I wanted to use the same one or change it. pretty cool)
- The bot then responds with a list of theaters near my zip and the showtimes for the movie requested.
- I can enter the line# for the theater I’m interested in and get a listing of all the movies being shown at that location
- I can message “m” at anytime for a menu for additional options.
All in all, this is a really cool little application integrated into an existing infrastructure. Right now, AOL only has two bots that I’m aware of: MovieFone and AOL’s ShoppingBuddy. I wonder how long it will be before you’ll have a search buddy or weather buddy, or horoscope buddy, or sports buddy.
Update: Just visited their site, they have other bots available too, one for MLB, so that would be part of my sportsbuddy idea. I also added the AOLYellowPages bot. It was okay, but I’d probably use a website instead for that bit of information.