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!

Last night we launched our new site along with a bit of a change in direction for IMified. We started out as a tool (IM bot) that made it easy to connect your instant messenger to popular web applications. We quickly realized that there are a lot of developers out there looking for a simple way to build IM bots and connect them to their applications. V2 of IMified aims to solve that problem by offering a web-based platform that allows developers to write their IM application once in any language, host it on any web server, and point it to any number of screen names on public IM networks like Gtalk™, AIM™, MSN™, and Yahoo™.

What’s new?
A lot. Our new site introduces the IMified developer platform for quickly and easily launching IM applications (bots). Our FREE developer platform includes:

• Up to three custom Gtalk/Jabber screen names on our bot.im domain
• The ability to connect your bot to public networks. (Gtalk™, AIM™, MSN™, Yahoo™)
• An interactive real-time debugger for testing your bots
• Simple REST API for sending IM messages/alerts and polling for IM status (presence)
• Live real-time usage statistics on your applications
• Free developer support
• Publicize your bot in the App Directory (soon)

** The platform is still in beta so please send feedback

What will pricing look like when the beta is over?
Pricing is still being determined but our goal is offer an easy and affordable way to create IM bots and we intend to always offer a free and low cost hosting option.

Ok, so what’s happening to the existing IMified bots?
Nothing, they’re still there. You can find our old home page here and you can still add/edit widgets to your IMified menu. We’re working on moving all of our widgets into the new App Directory (coming soon). Each widget will have its own screen name and in turn offer more/better functionality.

We’re looking forward to seeing what you create on the new platform. Feedback is welcome and is appreciated.

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!

When we heard yesterday that FriendFeed had released their API we figured we’d go ahead and offer some IM integration right away. We’ve created a Jabber/Gtalk IM bot for posting entries to your friendfeed stream. It supports posting links and messages for now. Add friendfeed@imified.com friendfeed@bot.im to your jabber/gtalk buddy list and send it a message to try it out. Send “help” to the bot to see how it works.
We held off on offering IM alerts of updates and comments because we want to hear from you on how you’d like to see them work. Do you want alerts of all activity? Alerts only from certain friends? Alerts from certain services? Please let us know and we’ll follow your lead.

The friendfeed IM bot was created in just an hour or so using the IMified API. If you’d like to create your own friendfeed bot or a bot for your web site or personal use, head over to the developers page and request a beta invite. Our API makes it ridiculously simple to integrate IM in your applications. We’re really close to leaving beta and launching our new developers site that will include instant bot setup, usage reporting, and external network integration with AIM, MSN, and Yahoo.

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.