Update: Google has been very helpful and resolved the issue. Those with hosted bot.im bots may now to talk to them via Gtalk and any other jabber network.

We recently sent out a slew of beta invites to our bot hosting platform and have opened up access to anyone who wants to try it out. A big thanks to everyone who’s waited patiently and have setup a bot!

In anticipation of opening up the platform we decided to host all new jabber/gtalk bots on a new domain, bot.im, as opposed to the imified.com domain. This allows us to seperate the core IMified bot traffic (which can be hefty) from our hosted bots and also offers developers a more generic domain to run your bot on. Plus, we just think bot.im is a pretty cool domain!

Now to address the title of this post. You may have noticed that you cannot access your yourbot@bot.im screen name from your google talk account.  We figured out the issue after quite a bit of hair pulling and it appears what happened is someone, at some point, registered our new bot.im domain with Google Apps for Your Domain.  Obviously this person never confirmed they own the domain, being that we do, but regardless Google still “locks out” anyone from administering the domain in Gapps. Now, we host our own jabber servers but Google will route any jabber traffic to and from a Google Apps domain through their jabber servers. So when you try to talk to your bot from gtalk, google is sending your message to their jabber servers as opposed to ours.

As crazy as the above sounds, its true, and not something I’d expect from Google. See this Google help page for the strange truth. You’d think that a domain would not be locked until someone proved that they actually own the domain. We’ve put in a request to Google to please release our domain and not allow anyone else to set up a Gapps account with it. As soon as it’s resolved we’ll send out an email to everyone with a beta bot.

Thanks for sticking with us!

When we heard yesterday that FriendFeed had released their API we figured we’d go ahead and offer some IM integration right away. We’ve created a Jabber/Gtalk IM bot for posting entries to your friendfeed stream. It supports posting links and messages for now. Add friendfeed@imified.com friendfeed@bot.im to your jabber/gtalk buddy list and send it a message to try it out. Send “help” to the bot to see how it works.
We held off on offering IM alerts of updates and comments because we want to hear from you on how you’d like to see them work. Do you want alerts of all activity? Alerts only from certain friends? Alerts from certain services? Please let us know and we’ll follow your lead.

The friendfeed IM bot was created in just an hour or so using the IMified API. If you’d like to create your own friendfeed bot or a bot for your web site or personal use, head over to the developers page and request a beta invite. Our API makes it ridiculously simple to integrate IM in your applications. We’re really close to leaving beta and launching our new developers site that will include instant bot setup, usage reporting, and external network integration with AIM, MSN, and Yahoo.

Earlier today during some routine DB upgrades we ran across a MySQL bug that took the bots offline for several hours.  No data was lost due to the outage, the core IMified bots were brought back online, and they seem to be behaving very well again.  Now it is me who needs a little nap.

Looks like Google talk users will soon be able to chat with AIM users. Google Operating System (not an offical Google blog, despite the name) has some screenshots of a new Gmail UI that Google’s testing.

Included in the new Gtalk window is an option to sign onto AIM and your AIM buddies appear right alongside your Gtalk contacts. Cool.

What would be better, however, is real integration. Instead of turning the Gtalk web UI into a mutli-protocol client, how about letting Gtalk and AIM users talk to each other at the server level? Gtalk users should be able to talk directly with AIM users. I shouldn’t have to have an AIM account to chat with an IM user over Gtalk, and I shouldn’t have to use the official Gtalk client to do it.

This is a lot like the Microsoft and Yahoo integration. They didn’t integrate their chat systems, they just implemented each other’s protocols in the official clients.

Since we pretty much live on the web over here at IMified, we love Tumblr. By aggregating all the different services where your digital life resides, you can build a lifestream blog quickly and easily. Items from your blog, from your photos on the web, from your bookmarks and social networks are all nicely intermingled.

So we’d like to offer our congrats to Tumblr on the launch of Tumblr 3.0, with hundreds of new features, including better pictures and video, audio support, and the ability to post to your tumblelog in a variety of new ways. And we’re proud to be powering the new AIM bot for Tumblr, TumblrBot. If you’ve got a Tumblr account, try it out by adding the screenname TumblrBot to your buddy list and saying hello.

Our Feed Crier product is frequently used to keep tabs on important feeds. The real-time alerts that Feed Crier provides allows anyone to subscribe to a feed and have it delivered to their IM client immediately. No waiting for your reader to update or wading through all the other items in your reader to get to the really important stuff.

Feed Crier made a big step forward today in helping you manage your news flow by adding APML support. Your attention profile is no longer locked up in Feed Crier — you can now export your attention data to be used in other products that can use APML.

Starting today Feed Crier allows you to create and export an APML file. Soon we’ll allow you to import APML from other products too, making your attention truly portable. We’ll also allow you to start filtering your feeds for items that match your attention. You can continue to get alerts for everything in a feed, but soon you’ll be able to set some of your feeds to only alert you when something comes up that’s important to you.

Where can you use APML? Support is growing — this morning Bloglines and NewsGator announced APML support across all their products.

To enable your attention profile and export your APML file, say “list” to Feed Crier and click the link to manage your account.

We are in the process of moving some of our jabber stuff to new servers. During this time our imified@imified.com jabber screen name may appear offline for a little bit while our new DNS propegates. TTL’s are very low so some of you may not see any glitch at all.

If you’re looking to get some IMified action you can try one of our other screen names, or just hang tight as jabber should be back online shortly.

UPDATE: DNS appears to be mostly propegated now and imified@imified.com should be online. If it does not show online for you, remove the bot and add it to your buddy list again and it should work.

IMified is pleased to announce the launch of our hosted services available through the IMified platform. Now anyone can create an IM bot just as easily as creating a web application.

We’re convinced that the ubiquity and ease of use of IM makes it important for everyone to IMify their web apps. So we’ve created a platform that makes it fast and simple to create and deploy IM integration that runs over multiple networks. A simple RESTful API allows you to add IM capabilities to your existing application using the programing tools, techniques, and server components you’re already using for your web site.

You don’t need to build a web server to create a great web app. You shouldn’t have to build an IM server to create a great IM app.

We want everyone to be able to add IM to their sites, so we’ve created a pricing structure that allows anyone to get involved. You can create widgets that run in the IMified bot for free or get your own Jabber/Gtalk ID for as little as $10 a month. For more serious usage, we offer upgraded services that can handle the needs of the most demanding bot.

Want to IMify your app? Check out our developer pages for details on the API, our pricing, and to sign up. The service is in a limited beta right now, but if you leave your contact details, we’ll send you an invite as slots open up.

For those of you who have taken advantage of the now deprecated widget API , your widgets will continue to function as normal. We’ll send you details on how you can take advantage of the new API as we get closer to opening up the platform, however you may request an invite to the beta if you’d like a sneak peak.

Some of you may have noticed your tweets were not getting posted when sent via the twitter widget.  The issue has been fixed.  We also made some adjustments to notifications. Your friend updates will be arriving  little faster now.

We think Pownce is really cool. So cool in fact that we did some digging around in their (unofficial) API to see if we could add some sort of IM support to the uber anticipated messaging app. Thanks to guys like Kyle Hays, Mike Taylor, and Clint Ecker, who discovered the hidden api and documented its login scheme, we were able to integrate most Pownce features into a new IMified widget. To add the widget just select the “My Account” option in your IMified menu and click the link provided to access the widget directory.

The Pownce widget will let you post messages, links, events, and sends IM notifications of new Pownce messages. Notifications are checked for every 120 seconds. To enable notifications, select the “Toggle Notifications” option in your Pownce menu.

As stated above, this widget was built on the “Unofficial” Pownce api. As far as we can tell the team over at Pownce isn’t restricting access to it, however they’re not encouraging developers to use it. A recent blog entry on the Pownce site says they’re working on an official API, but we just couldn’t wait to release the first Pownce addon (that we know of).

If you’ve got any suggestions for improving the widget, or if it’s just not working for you, let us know in the forums.

BTW, we have some Pownce invites. Leave a comment if you want one. We’re “IMified” on Pownce if your looking for another friend : )