DuckDuckGo chat bot: imddg.gg | Hacker News Reader

DuckDuckGo chat bot: imddg.gg

gabrielweinberg.com

50 pointsphsr17 comments

Names are important. Putting aside that "DuckDuckGo" itself is still an odd naming choice, this choice isn't much better, considering the blog post mistypes it too:

    > DuckDuckGo chat bot: im@ddg.gg
    > DuckDuckGo now has a chat bot at im@ddd.gg that will respond [...]

>"DuckDuckGo" itself is still an odd naming choice

I think what makes the name weird is that it interjects not zero, not one, but TWO hard sounds ("ck") in the middle of the name. It requires 5 movements to speak it out loud (Du-ck-Du-ck-Go), as oppossed to 2 (Goo- Gel). One has to be careful with adding hard sounds into the middle of product names.

It's not the "ck" sound that makes it difficult/slow; it's the "ck" followed immediately by the "d". Both sounds are stops, and stops are somewhat difficult to produce consecutively.

Compare with a name like "Conoco", which contains the same sound that you were complaining about in DuckDuckGo twice as well, but is much easier to say because both occurrences of it are preceded and followed by vowels.

>DuckDuckGo chat bot: im@ddg.gg

>DuckDuckGo now has a chat bot at im@ddd.gg

Apparently the domain name even confuses the author

Actually the author routinely makes typos, at least 3 in every post :). Fixed.

Note it is also at im@duckduckgo.com

Chat bots are a lot of fun. Google App Engine handles incoming instant messages just like other web requests, so developing a chat bot for App Engine is quite similar to developing any other webapp.

For more info on App Engine's XMPP integration:

http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/xmpp/overview.h...

And my shameless self-plug:

http://social-butterfly.appspot.com/

On a side note, if you are looking to develop a bot using a standard HTTP service hosted anywhere using any language (not just Python and Java) with a better domain name (@bot.im as compared to @appspot.com), you could try http://www.imified.com/

The good thing about appengine though is that everything is so well integrated that you don't really have to look to piecing together the parts.

That URL reminds me of The King's Speech.

Great idea! I looks like XMPP services are getting more and more popular, and it's a great thing.

I love the bot provided by Producteev to manager your tasks, it's way more convenient than having to open your browser, login to the website, clicking in the right place.

I hope to see more services allowing it's user to interact via a bot.

> Node.js is ideal for such routing/switching based interactions where it takes data from one end, pumps it to the other and does the reverse.

I've been intrigued by node.js since it comes up on HN so much, but this has really got me interested as this describes exactly a portion of a project I'm working on right now. In my case, the data would be copious and binary rather than instant message text -- anyone know if node.js is performant enough to handle that case?

I would be interested in knowing the results of your findings. So, from my brief understanding of node.js, it's well suited for such stuff. There's special handling in node for binary data. The answer probably depends on whether you want to blindly shuffle data (piping) or do something smart like interpret it, etc...

A small experiment (profiled) which emulates your use-case would surely throw some light on the question.

  ['i','m','d','g'].each |letter| do
    print letter * fib(i+1) # Fibonacci
  end
  # yields imddggg

I have a request.

Please add another alias, like ddg or duck. You're showing up as "im" in my buddies list, and frankly, that's not very informative to me.

EDIT: Never mind, I guess I can rename you on my end.

I swear half of the web is just re-implementing stuff like IRC and finger and ytalk that have been around for nearly a quarter century.

Wish I had realized this 10 years ago.

Well, since you've realized it now, what are you going to do about it? :)

Continue running my company, probably.

You haven't seen whether the services will succeeded, though.

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