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March 3, 2009

Choosing Reliability for MSN and AIM

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.

Filed under  //   aol   hab.la   jabber   livehelp   msn   xmpp  

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February 28, 2009

Retooling AIM Support and MSN Support is Back

I strongly recommend any of our users who are using AIM to access Hab.la to switch to Jabber.

After extensive testing, and debugging we keep hitting the AOL rate limits and will have to rethink how our Hab.la AOL bots are working. For the time being we will no longer be notifying AIM users when buddies come to their site. However, AIM users will still receive messages from users who choose to chat with them.

We will be working through this problem in the coming weeks, and contacting AOL to explore all of our options.

The good news is that MSN Support is back. MSN support has been in testing for a few weeks and we are finally able to say that users who are on MSN and cannot use Jabber with Hab.la will be able to take advantage of most Hab.la features using their normal MSN Client.

-Ben

Filed under  //   aim   msn  

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July 17, 2008

MSN Protocol an Interesting Read

Consider this an allusion to what is to come :-)

For those of you who are interested in the underlying protocol behind Microsoft’s MSN Messenger program, there is a very good overview of the protocol at http://www.hypothetic.org/docs/msn/notification/get_details.php#fl.

One of the most interesting aspects of the protocol design is that each MSN user has 4 roster lists.

BL – Block List - a list of users you have blocked.

AL - Allow List - a list of users allowed to know if you are online.

FL – Forward List - a list of users whose presence you are subscribed to. (This is the traditional roster)

RL – Reverse List - a list of users who have you on their Forward List.

If you’d like to learn more about the protocol I’d recommend reading http://www.hypothetic.org/docs/msn/notification/get_details.php#fl. It’s a great place to start when writing your own client.

Filed under  //   msn   protocol  

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