For few years in between, there was limited or low activity on the world of gtalk/yahoo bots; I recall a certain yahoo bot by the name mama_pendse which was hot in early 2000 in India.

Very recently, there has been increased activity around this, with naukri.com launching the beta of its job search on gtalk and cleartrip also launching train search on gtalk just a few days later.

The benefit is clear for a job portal – many companies do not allow access to job sites. By using the messenger route, they are able to get access a new set of users. For cleartrup though, it looks more like a novelty/marketing strategy than an immediate business problem that they might have solved.

All of this makes me think if we are ready to host business applications on IM just yet. For one, all the data gets piped through google, but google anyway knows what I ate in the morning, so thats not as much an issue. The risk however could be, how much data these organizations are ready to share with google (A colleague wants google analytics to be removed from one of our companies portals for the same reason). Google already knows their ad spends and marketing directions through adwords, their web site usage and stickiness through analytics and now user’s perception of the site as well through searchwiki.

The other important aspect would be the scalability of these applications. I hear from sources that yahoo and google have a limit to the number of contacts one can add on the messenger. That does not seem to be a big problem since these bots are avoiding roster manipulation in xmpp entirely. When you add a naukri job search bot, see that the bot remains invited and you are not added to the bot’s friend list. However, you can still interact with the bot.

As more and more people use the job search bot for example, the pipe between google and the bot will get choked, resulting in companies using a series of such bots; jobsearch1, jobsearch 2 …. etc.

Three, google (unlike yahoo in the past), is promoting the use of its servers and publicizing the use of its platform for messaging applications. It would not be far enough that google will start sending advertisements (chat ads) along with the bot messages, opening a yet another revenue stream for them.