Google Wave Development

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Rssybot

(Added 14th September 2009)

Status information

30th October 2009

Rssybot is currently down. Stand by for more information...

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

Google-wave-Rssybot on github

Screenshots