I cannot decide what if anything I want to use this for, but this is a very nice little tutorial on writing your own IM bot. [via Lifehacker] It presumes you know how to do the server-side scripting (though they do give a nice sample php script so you can see there really isn’t anything IM specific in there) and the tutorial just shows how to IMified service to host a bot for you. Right now IMified is in beta, so you can get an account free, but it looks like they may start charging later so if you think you are interested you might want to sign up now. If you really get into it, there is also more documentation at the IMified site, but I like the short tutorial I linked for giving you the essentials on what it would take to get this set up.