Who knew that invading robots could be so charming?  MSN is having a contest for IM bot development, the creation of automated IM buddies you can add to notify you whenever something in particular is available.  Like the MakeBot or AIM's handy news bots.  My girlfriend often hears my Adium quack and asks "who's IMing you?"  We both get a kick out of saying, "it's only a robot."

What are your favorite IM bots?  What functionalities would you like to see in a robot buddy?  I don't use many right now, but my favorite hands down is Peter Brown's immedi.at.  What would I like in a future bot?  A bot that knows whether I'm online and sends me an SMS if I'm not, like Rasasa does to people other than US Verizon users like me.  And the ability to differentiate between message instructions, as in "for these 3 alerts, text me if I'm off-line, for all my other alerts just send an IM or nothing."  I'd also like to have some thresh-hold setting capabilities.  As in, notify me once more than 3 people have tagged the Social Software Weblog "brilliant" or "foolish" in del.icio.us.  Ok, so not that in particular - but you can imagine.

What about you?  What would you like to see an army of invading MSN bots bring?
Contesty goodness found via Programmable Web.