The posts here have been a bit slow mostly because we’ve been working really hard to publish the first version of the IMified API. With the new API also comes the introduction of what we call IM widgets. IM widgets are services that can be interacted with and added to your IMified menu and can now be developed by anyone, in any language.  Check out the API docs and give it a whirl. We can’t wait to see what kind of stuff you guys come up with. We feel like an API was the next logical step for IMified. It’s a lot of fun seeking out and integrated services, but there’s just so much we can do in a day. Our hope is that application owners will embrace our api and build widgets that their users can interact with on IMified. So, if you’d like to see your favorite app on IMified, send them a link to our API and tell them to get crackin.

Our first public widget written on the api was created by the awesome url shortening site urlTea.com. We’ve also added a new Jaiku widget to the gallery that lets you post updates to your Jaiku account. We’re working on building in Jaiku updates as well, so you can receive updates from your contacts as well as comments from any of your Jaiku posts.

Thanks to all for your patience while we continue to do our best to scale our bots and squash some of the bugs in our widgets. Please visit the forums for help creating your widgets or to just say hi. You can also always send us an email at imified@imified.com.. we’d love to hear from you.

It appears the Twitter IM bots are still down, but have no fear, we just added support for notification updates to go along with the release of status updating last week. What can I say, we’re opportunists!

If you’ve already setup twitter as an IMified service you’ll now see the menu option “Toggle Notifications”. Selecting this option will turn on and off notifications. You might also want to create a couple shortcuts for posting to twitter and toggling notifications for super fast twittering.

Enjoy

Over the weekend we added Twitter as a new IMified service. We definitely feel their pain trying to keep an IM bot up and running. We’ve had our own issues in case you haven’t noticed ; ) So when the twitter bot is down feel free to get your twit on over here. For now, all you can do is post status updates but we may build in some other api features if you guys want them. Let us know.

Btw, our twitter id is, you guessed it, imified. We’ll be posting dev news and service updates so feel free to add us, we can use the friends.

We hate to offer up a “hack” for the recent issue with our Gtalk/Jabber screen name but it’s starting to look like we might need another day or two to work out a permanent solution. Current Jabber users can add the screen name “IMified2@gmail.com” to your buddy list and interact with it the same as you would with the other screen name.

** Note: Presence based reminders will not work using this screen name. Reminders will still go to your IM client but will not be sent to your email and or mobile if offline.

Here’s a little insight into what’s going on. We connect to the talk.google.com server to run our Gtalk/Jabber screen name. We are a bit of an anomoly in that we are a screen name running on their server with an extraordinarily high number of buddies, all requesting and receiving presence when the buddy list loads. While we haven’t spoken to Google yet, it looks like their server(s) are having a tough time sending out our presence and receiving our buddies’ presence when we start up the bot.

We’re doing a bit of trailblazing here and expected to run up against some roadblocks along the way. Running a popular bot on different networks presents some challenges as each has their own quirks and rules. Thanks for sticking with us!

We are feverishly working to resolve this issue. Thanks for your patience and sorry for the inconvenience.

In a perfect world all the networks, AIM, Yahoo, and MSN would all run on XMPP. Unfortunately, that’s not the case and IMified is at the mercy of the networks we run on. Except of course Gtalk/Jabber which do run on XMPP. In any event, because you guys are being uber productive using IMified on Yahoo, they’ve taken our buddy down. If your wondering “why would Yahoo take down a service that their users obviously want to use?”, we’re working on getting that answer. So far we’re confident we have removed any future issues with AIM as we are in the process of signing a network agreement with them and are also working on the same with MSN/WLM. We’ve got some calls and emails into Yahoo and are waiting on a response. We’ll let you know whats going on as soon as we know.

So, its 4:00 am here in Naples, FL and we just now got things patched up and running again. The problem actually occured when a log file grew to about 40gig without us aware of it and eventually used up all the space on the server hosting our IM gateways and hosed a bunch of stuff. Long story short, we spent the day rebuilding and making sure this doesn’t happen again. Thanks for your patience and support.

We had to shutdown all of our IM gateways this morning due to an issue with one of the gateways acting eradically. We’re working on it and apologize (again) for the downtime. We’ve been running with little to no downtime since we launched. While the past couple days things haven’t gone as smooth, please rest assured that we’re going to get things humming again.

The city in which our servers are located experienced a MAJOR power outage this morning. While we ran on the generator for some time, we eventually ran out of juice. As of 1pm est. we are back online!

IMified’s growing very fast and we’re working on some procedures to avoid this problem in the future. We apologize if this has caused you any trouble.

I’ll be headed across Alligator Alley tonight to attend BarCamp Miami and hopefully get a chance to demo IMified to the group.

More info on the event here.