Day: <span>August 17, 2002</span>

Frontier.UserLand.Com: Beta: Instant Messaging in Frontier/Radio.

“tcp.im is an instant messaging client and server framework for Frontier and Radio UserLand. With tcp.im, you can create applications that call through IM, or receive calls through IM.

“The architecture is open: There’s a driver architecture which allows developers create their own drivers to handle any IM protocol. This release includes drivers for Jabber and AIM.

“In addition to the driver framework, there’s a responder framework based on user.webserver.responders. Several sample responders are included.”

Eric Soroos Confessions of a Patent Infringer:

“…ActiveBuddy now has a patent on your garden variety chat bot, and they plan on enforcing the patent. Unfortunately, I’m not prior art. But lots of things on the net are…

“Somehow, the patent examiners neglected to do a google search, as the first page of hits for elizabot has two examples of prior art (prior to 8/2000), irc bot comes up with a few, as does chat bot. The Net::AIM module for perl (including a simple bot) was released a year earlier. The ALICEbot won prizes before the filing…”