Rssybot
Rssybot uses version 1 of the Google Wave API. It may be useful to you for learning architecture and API-independent techniques, but it is not a good resource for learning API usage.
Rssybot is the perfect solution to allow you to watch your RSS feeds from Google Wave. This incredibly simple robot couldn’t be more useful! Just add it to a wave, enter the link to the RSS feed you want to subscribe to and wait for new posts to appear in your inbox as unread blips.
Although Rssybot may appear quite simplistic it does some interesting things under the hood. Consider this scenario…
You have an RSS reader installed on your desktop computer which alerts you when you have a new post. How does it do this? Well it has to keep asking the RSS server if there are any new messages. So it may for example contact the RSS server every 10 minutes for new messages just to find out there are none. This may not seem like a problem… but now imagine if 1000 users do the same thing. The RSS server has to effectively send the RSS feed to 1000 users every 10 minutes. For just 1000 users the RSS feed has to be sent 144,000 times a day.
Seems wasteful… it’s a good job that Rssybot helps to reduce this number! Let me explain how… If 10 users use Rssybot to watch the same feed Rssybot will realize that more than one user wants to see the same data, so it will only ask the RSS server once for new posts for those 10 users. So if we take the scenario from above but this time have those 1000 users use Rssybot to watch the same RSS feed we can bring that number of 144,000 requests down to just 144! And what’s even better? You get to do all this from right within Google Wave!
APIs: Google Wave Robots
Language: Java
How do I use it?
- New! Use the extension installer at http://www.wave.to/botinstaller/rssybot_bot_installer.xml to add Rssybot to your new wave menu. Select Rssybot from the drop down list to make a new wave. Enter the URL to the RSS feed you want watch and press subscribe. Now all you have to do is wait. When a new post appears on the feed Rssybot will put it into the wave for you! When you want to read the post just click open and the post will be opened in the blip. You can close it again by pressing the close button.
- Add rssybot@appspot.com to Google Wave. Add Rssybot to a thread. Enter the URL to the RSS feed you want watch and press subscribe. Now all you have to do is wait. When a new post appears on the feed Rssybot will put it into the wave for you! When you want to read the post just click open and the post will be opened in the blip. You can close it again by pressing the close button.
Source code
Other links
Screenshots & other media
about 6 months ago
Looks great… but isn’t working… doesn’t seem to have been working since october. When I add it to a wave, rssybot just post this message:
“Rssybot is experiencing technical difficulties and is currently down. For up to date status information check http://www.wave.to/robots/rssybot ”
Is this a problem on my end, or is this bot just never going to work?
about 5 months ago
and still down
about 5 months ago
No it’s a problem our end. Now that the new api has come out google are going to kill the old api later in the year. We will keep the rssybot code available for reference but all our current robots will go down at some point.
about 3 months ago
Any idea when or if it will be back up?
about 3 months ago
At the moment there are no plans to continue development on Rssybot. We will be moving Rssy, starify, wave live messenger and the hangman robot to an archive section on the site soon when Google bring down the version 1 api. The source code will remain available though for anyone who wants to use the projects as a reference.