Alerts System

If you hear or see something about this, be a darling and let me know about it, will you?

Introduction to the problem and the proposed solution

Brownian see and hears a lot of stuff. It also interacts with a lot of people. Certainly a lot of lobsters, at the very least.

It would be very cool if we could have it alert us whenever something of interest to us occurs, like a tweet about a particular phrase, or directed towards a specific user, an item in a RSS feed comes up that might be of interest, etc.

This page details the system as we wanted it to operate. If something already exists that provides this functionality or that could be adapted to provide the functionality, great, otherwise, we will write it from scratch.

Sources of information

To begin with, and in order to make the problem manageable in the short time-slices the devel team has available, we'll work only with whatever sources are already currently available to Brownian, therefore, we will consider as items to be evaluated for their interest whatever the bot sees or sends to the channel.
I call this the KISS-at-first approach. :-)

In the future, it would be cool if we could have it monitor some more sources of information and receive updates from them to provide possible alerts to us. Some of the possible information sources that we have come up with are:

• PubSubHubBub
• Google News (?)
• <Add your own desired sources>

Alert mediums

We also expect the alerts to be sent in private. Brownian should send a given user a private message with each alert. It should not broadcast the alert to any channels.

It would also be interesting if we could make it send messages via XMPP, but this will probably be added later on.

Any other mediums you would like to see in the future?

Programming the alerts

In keeping with the KISS-at-first philosophy, whenever a user sees something that interests her, she would simply reply (either via private '/msg' or in public, in the channel itself) to Brownian, with an instruction to be warned whenever something "like that" occurs again.

The specific instruction set that Brownian will have to implement in order to support this (with our current information sources) is proposed below. This is not a flexible, general-purpose command set, it will probably have to be rewritten in the future in order to provide the kind of flexibility we dream of, but this will be enough to get it off the ground.

First-order approach command-set

• !alert add twitter from: Alert me whenever Brownian sees a tweet from the same user;
• !alert add twitter from <user>: Alert me whenever Brownian sees a tweet from <user>;
• !alert add twitter to: Alert me whenever Brownian sees a tweet directed to the same user;
• !alert add twitter to <user>: Alert me whenever Brownian sees a tweet directed to <user>;
• !alert add rss: Alert me whenever Brownian sees a new RSS item on the same feed;
• !alert add rss <url>: Alert me whenever Brownian sees a new RSS item feed <url>;
• !alert add phrase <phrase>: Alert me whenever Brownian sees the phrase <phrase> uttered in any channel it is currently on;
• !alert list: Send me a private message with all of my alerts;
• !alert del <spec>: Delete the alert that was configured with !alert add <spec>.

Desirable command-set

When the system's plumbing is all done and stabilized we will, no doubt, want to have the bot do many more and marvellous things with it's alerts system.
This is the place to write up all of those things. From the command-set to the semantics associated with each command.

Possible meta-syntax for alerts/reminders. to:

Example: alert|remind me|nick(s)|everyone of "search query" on twitter|news