google

We noticed a few excited Tweets and other messages from those who noticed that your Shizzow IM shout notifications started mysteriously working again yesterday. As most of you know, we had been struggling to get IM notifications working with GTalk again after something changed on the Google side that was disrupting Shizzow IM notifications. Gtalk worked fine until last October, and in the meantime other non-Google XMPP IM accounts (like Jabber.org) continued to work over the past few months.

Don’t worry, it wasn’t the gremlins - here’s what happened. On our side, we were using Google Apps, including chat, within the Shizzow team on our shizzow.com email addresses. We also have an Openfire XMPP server running on shizzow.com to handle IM notifications for the Shizzow application. Apparently, back in October, Google decided that if somebady had more than one XMPP server running on a domain that it would consider the Google Apps server authoritative and block any others. Brilliant. After Ryan disabled our Google chat for shizzow, *poof* everything started working as expected again.

A huge thank you to Matthew Gifford for creating the Shizzow Google Gadget. His reason for creating it was simple:

“I love the service, but often don’t remember to update my location. I needed to find a way to remind myself to use it.

Since its recent redesign, I’ve been using iGoogle several times a day. It seemed like the perfect place to put Shizzow.”

(Quote from Matthew Gifford)

If you want a quick and easy reminder to use Shizzow, I encourage you to take a look! Don’t forget to buy Matt a beverage the next time you see him out and about to thank him for sharing his Shizzow Google Gadget with the rest of us.

Many of you noticed last week that you stopped getting IM notifications from Shizzow. I have been crying over my green tea about all of the missed shouts and the missed opportunities to meet up with cool people that come with them. However, all is not lost.

Here’s what we think happened: we suspect that we have been blacklisted by the Google XMPP servers. If you are using GTalk or any IM service running through Google Applications at your company, you are probably not getting IM notifications. The rest of you are still happily receiving your notifications. We are working hard to resolve it by sending emails into an apparent black hole that is Google HQ. I suspect that it has something to do with the Large Hadron Collider, so if someone in the bay area could verify whether or not Google HQ has been sucked into a black hole, we would appreciate it.

OK, enough whining and speculating. You can still get your IM notifications by signing up for a non-Google XMPP / Jabber based IM account. Jabber.org seems to be working just fine for me right now.

We’ll let you know when we have wrestled our way off of the Google XMPP server blacklist. Wish us luck.