On Saturday, January 29th our network operations team will be performing network upgrades from the hours of 1am est. – 5am est.

All IM screen names will be offline during this time and SMS messages will not be routed to bots.

We expect all service to be restored around 5am on the 29th.

Some of you may have heard that Twitter is dropping support for one of the authentication methods that their API supports in favor of a new, more secure authentication system by June, 2010. IMified has always used the more secure OAuth authentication method to connect Twitter to your bot’s,  so there won’t be an issues when the change is in place.

Today we hit a bit of milestone. We’re now hosting over 10k active IM, Twitter, and SMS bots! This year in particular we’ve nearly doubled the amount of apps we’re hosting. If you are one of the 10k apps doing something cool on the platform, please let us know, we’d love to hear about it.

It’s also been nearly a year since IMified was acquired by Voxeo. Since then, IMified has been integrated with Voxeo’s hosted IVR platform as well as Tropo. We continue to work on finalizing our new bot hosting platform and anticipate opening things up for production use sometime this summer.

Over at the Voxeo Developer’s Corner blog, I’ve posted an article and sample code that shows how to add reporting to your IM bots with Google Analytics.

Using [Google's] mobile support, you can now add Google Analytics to your IM bots. Any time someone sends a message to your bot, the interaction will be sent to Google Analytics and will show up in your reports alongside your web traffic.

Apparently our account with our DNS provider has lapsed. We apologize for the downtime. DNS service has been restored and IMified.com as well as bot.im bots should be resolving soon.

Update 10:34am est: All IMified sites and bots should be resolving properly

Join us on October 7th for a free webinar when we will be teaming up with Voxeo’s VoiceObjects team to talk about building multi-channel applications that work across IM, SMS, twitter, the web, and voice.

Topic: IMify your voice application! Exploring new ways of customer interaction with Voxeo VoiceObjects and IMified

Date: Wednesday, October 7th, 2009
Time: 8am PDT, 11am EDT, 5pm CEST

Speakers:
Dave Hoff, Senior Engineer, Voxeo Tobias Goebel, Sr. Presales Consultant, Voxeo Germany

Abstract: With the acquisition of IMified and VoiceObjects, Voxeo has demonstrated its clear commitment to be the number 1 provider of Unified Self-Service™: the idea that one and the same service definition can drive dialogs in any modality available to end customers, be it voice, video, SMS, USSD, IM, Web, or even social networks.

This jam session introduces IMified, Voxeo’s hosted platform for Instant Messaging bots, and explains how VoiceObjects can be utilized to build dialogs that extend the scope of customer interaction to Instant Messaging networks such as Yahoo, Skype, AOL, MSN, or Google Talk, but also other text-based channels such as SMS or Twitter. Learn how to IMify your existing VoiceObjects application with minimal developer effort but maximum customer impact.

If you can’t attend on Wednesday, we will post a link to an archive of the webinar for viewing later. Hope to see you Wednesday!

IMified will be offline tonight, 8/17, starting at 11pm est for approximately 2 hours. We will be migrating IMified from its current DC to its new home at Voxeo. Service should resume as normal after we flip the switch.

We have created a system status blog at http://status.imified.com. Please check there for updates.

We’ve just released a couple of handy features for your bots. First, we’ve added Google Talk as a network that you can add to your bot. Our Jabber bots have always allowed GTalk users to talk to them, but with this addition, you can have a Google Talk Jabber ID for your bot. Hook it up and add yourbot@gmail.com as an option for your users. Or if you’re using Google Apps for your domain, you can tie yourbot@yourdomain.com to your bot.

Next, a few oft-requested features have been added to the API. Get a list of all your users, update your extended status, and connect multiple bots to the same URL.

Update Status allows you to set the extended status message for your bot. Some IM clients show this in the friends list right alongside the bot’s name. Just send your status message to our update status method and tell us which network you want to add the status message to. Update status on Twitter, and we’ll post the message to your timeline.

We now send you an extra field when a message comes into your bot — your bot key. This allows you to know exactly which bot a message came in to. Why would you need to know that? Using this, you can connect several bots to a single url, and use the bot key to determine which bot the message was to.

And finally, if you want to grab a list of all your users at once, we have Get All Users. It returns the same familiar information as Get User does, but with a list of all your users. We also hand you a count of your users so you’ll be able to see at a glance how many you have.

Our goal with IMified is to allow you to write one application and have it work over any text-based channel. Be that public IM networks, private XMPP networks, or now Twitter.

If you have an existing IM bot, you can now connect a Twitter id to it. You don’t need to write any special code, deal with Twitter API rate limits, or do anything new with Twitter. Things will just work. Simply log into your account, select your application, and activate Twitter.

After you connect Twitter to your app, we’ll start sending you all the direct messages and mentions (aka @ replies) that it gets. Your app responds to those just like any other incoming instant message and we send your response back to the other person. If they sent you a DM, we’ll respond via DM. If the message was a mention, we’ll reply in kind. You can also push messages to Twitter users, sending them an @ reply or a direct message.

You might want to handle some formatting differently in Twitter than you do in your IM messages. To help you with that, we tell you if the message is coming from Twitter, AIM, or another network.

Want to try it out? We’ve got a demo set up called Gridlock. Send your location to gridlock@bot.im on Jabber or gridlockbot on AIM, Yahoo, or Twitter. The application will reply with any known traffic incidents that are reported by the Yahoo Traffic API.

To help you get started with building your own Twitter and IM applications, we’ve published the PHP source code for Gridlock. We’ve updated our API documentation to include information about Twitter.

And if you’re a user of Twitter, follow us at @imified and @voxeo.

So we’ve wrapped up our first week at Voxeo since announcing our acquisition last week and it’s been a blast! IMified has been a “virtual” startup from the beginning with Anthony, Adam, and myself spread accross the country in Idaho Falls ID, Sacramento CA, and Naples FL respectively. It was great to get the team together at Voxeo HQ in Orlando for some serious hacking, planning, and getting to know our new Voxeon colleagues.

We’d like to thank all the fine folks at Voxeo for the warm welcome. Voxeo has assembled an amazing staff with some of the nicest and brightest people we’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. Also, we’d be lying if we didn’t mention we’re just plain giddy about the on-staff barista, catered lunch on Fridays, and our new MB pro’s : )