Olark is a lightweight method to chat with visitors to your website using your existing instant messaging client. Visitors to your website appear as buddies on your Buddy list, their messages to you appear as IMs.
If you are using Hab.la with AOL, you will need to use a new set of Hab.la buddies, to have the new buddies added you need to either go through the wizard again: http://www.hab.la/wizard or add the buddies manually:
I’ve been trying to replicate the Hab.la experience on AIM and on MSN since around July of 2008. Today, after working on this problem off and on for far too many months, improving the existing pure python libraries for OSCAR (AIM’s protocol) and MSN, and finally rewriting everything using libpurple (the brains behind meebo, pidgin, adium, and finch). I have to admit defeat (at least in the short run).
It appears that the rate limiting on both MSN and AIM, makes it far too unreliable to try to build a bot, that sends a high number of status messages to the AIM and MSN servers (key to some of the protocol hacks I needed to make it work). After trying a lot of hacks, and getting everything working for small numbers of concurrent users, I’ve decided to stop bringing webusers online and offline as visitors come to your website – I could not stand behind the reliability of the service. From now on MSN and AIM users will have access to a limited version of Hab.la where they will not be able to easily initiate conversations with visitors to their websites. Although, their visitors will have no problem initiating conversations with them, and operators can still attempt to follow particular users by sending the message “/follow” to a webuser buddy on their buddylist.
We may add a few other modes of use for these protocols to make it easier to initiate conversations in the future, or bring back the old method if we can decrease our MSN or AIM ratelimit effectively, but this is unlikely to be a high priority in the near future.
We continue to recommend either connecting to Hab.la directly using a Jabber(XMPP) client. Or using Hab.la with an existing Gtalk or Jabber client. You will be able to take advantage of all of Hab.la’s features with either of these two approaches. Most notably: monitor visitor location on a website and initiate conversations directly with these visitors.
This is not the official release of these new features, but I thought I’d let our brave beta testers take a look at what we’ve been working on for the past month.
If you navigate to: http://staging.hablagroup.com:3000/
And sign up for an account, you will be able to chat with users on your website using MSN or AIM. That is to say, jabber will no longer be required!
Keep in mind that this is our staging server, and by no means stable. We often push out new releases, and wipe the database without warning. However, it might be fun for some of you to play with while we work out the bugs, before we send it to production.
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