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!

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!