Bots and Messenger network TOU
I received a good question about the Messenger network TOU and running bots, so I'm posting the question/answer here for everyone.
Question: "I just noticed that "Bots" are available from Microsoft for version 8, however, according to the Terms of Service for version 8, "Bots" are not allowed to be used. If I were to use a Microsoft-sponsored "Bot" on version 8, will I be in violation of the version 8 Terms of Service?"
Here's the link to the TOU:http://messenger.msn.com/Help/Terms.aspx?mkt=en-us
From section 3 "How you may use the service" "You may also not use any automated process or service to access and/or use the Service such as a BOT, a spider or periodic caching of information stored by Microsoft."
Answer: We're refering to a different type of bot in the TOU. This is one of the confusing things about the term bot. I'll look into how we can make this clearer in the network TOU. Anyway, people can certainly use bots in any version of messenger, although some like Encarta that use the Activity API will only work back to version 6.2.
Todd Biggs
Product Manager, Windows Live
