You may be familiar with Twitter, the increasingly popular 'micro-blogging' web app that allows users to 'tweet' what they're doing and to follow other's tweets.

In addition to live humans, Twitter is also proving to be a great platform for little 'bots' that allow Twitter users to do all kinds of things, including set up reminders, bookmark sites, and get weather updates. We thought it would be a pretty cool idea to set up a bot that allows users to search for books, music, and DVDs from Amazon.com -- in essence, a way to look for items of interest right from the Twitter command line. So after a little tinkering in our lab we came up with JungleBot, a simple yet effective bot that will respond to 'direct messages.'

Go ahead and check out the documentation, and then take JungleBot for a spin. It seems that JungleBot is making new friends in Twitter every day, and it sure would be great if you were one of them.