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 : )

IMified will be down for scheduled maintenance this Sunday, June 7 at 12am EST for approximately 1 hour. Bots hosted on the platform will experience a period of downtime. The issues with adding and removing networks from your bot will be resolved during this maintenance.

Mark Headd over at his Vox Populi blog talks about how governments can use IM Bots to improve service delivery. Complete with a sample app and php class for interacting with the IMified API. Thanks Mark!