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!

We are very excited to announce that IMified has been acquired by Voxeo! Voxeo is the leading provider of standards-focused Unified Communications and Self-Service platforms. You can read the announcement here and get the complete FAQ here.

It has been an amazing experience to see IMified grow out of a simple idea to the service it is today, providing thousands of developers with a simple platform for IM enabling applications. IMified now grows from a three person team to over 150! We are delighted to join forces with a company that shares the same ideas and vision for what we want to achieve with IMified. We’re looking forward to bolstering our service and further innovating with Voxeo’s helping hand.

What does this mean for IMified Users?
No immediate changes are planned for the service besides providing better and faster support and moving to a more robust infrastructure that will improve performance and increase capacity. As we transition over to our new family, we anticipate implementing some of the enhancements and features we just haven’t had the resources to get to.

Thank You!
Thank you to all of our users who have stuck with us through good times and bad times, or rather, “uptimes” and “downtimes” : ) Looking forward to more good times from here on in!

Regards,
Dave, Anthony, and Adam

Google Talk users trying to connect to a bot.im screen name will notice that the bot appears offline and is unresponsive. Google is currently having some server to server connection issues preventing their users from communicating with other federated jabber domains. We have contacted Google (as have others) and will update the status here when we know more.

Update 2/16/09:
Gtalk issues have been resolved. Gtalk users will now see bot.im screen names online.

You may find your bots go offline for a bit while we upgrade some systems here. We’re putting in place a new system that we hope will offer even more stability and reliability for your hosted bots. Thanks for your patience while we get the new stuff in place.

Update 9/29 at 1am - Upgrades complete

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.

Whew! Its been a hairy few days here after we unexpectedly appeared on the Digg home page and were forced to deal with a scaling issue we didn’t think we’d see so soon. Sorry to all the new developers who came on and signed up for an account only to find your new bot.im screen name’s offline. I’m happy to report that all your bots should be online now. We’ve also added server capacity to accommodate for new accounts. If your bot still appears offline you should try removing it from your buddy list then re-adding it.

We’re excited to be able to get back to work on publishing V2 of the IMified service which features a much improved bot management interface and the ability to attach screen names from other networks to your bots! We’ve also got a nice new look coming that your previewing here on the blog.

Also wanted to send a big thank you out to the fine folks at Voxeo and WorkHabit who graciously offered to help in our scaling efforts.

We are aware that new bots are not coming online immediately after signing up on the site. We made an unexpected appearance on the Digg home page yesterday into today and are working to get your new bots online as quickly as possible. Under normal load they’d be online right away. Please look here for an announcement when things are back to normal and thank you for trying us out!

UPDATE:
We’ve turned a number of bots on. If your bot is not one of them, hang on, we’re working on it.

UPDATE 2:
We’re completely back.

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!