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.