Update: Google has been very helpful and resolved the issue. Those with hosted bot.im bots may now 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!

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 8th, 2008 at 9:40 pm and is filed under Development, Gtalk/Jabber, api. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.