Hubot, Chat, The Web, and Working in the Open

I was listening to a podcast with some people from GitHub and I was struck by Hubot. My understanding of what they are doing: Hubot is a chat bot — in this case it hangs out in Campfire chat rooms, but it could equally be an IRC bot. It started out doing silly things, as bots often do, then started offering up status messages. Eventually it got a command language where you could actually do things