James Smith

JabberStatus was originally inspired by Twitter's facility to update your status via XMPP/Jabber. Unfortunately, Twitter's Jabber interface has been down for months now, which is rather sucky.

The solution to this? Extend JabberStatus to work for Twitter as well as Facebook. It turned out to be very easy, so it's online now. Just add twitterstatus@jabber.org to your contact list and it will talk you through the rest.

The JabberStatus code has moved to GitHub now, so you can grab it from there. The code for the CO2Updates app has also moved there.

Twitter, while it has its problems, does one thing very well. The IM interface allows you to update your status via a Jabber account, which just makes it so easy to do. Facebook, on the other hand, has no such facility, which is unfortunate because although I like the Facebook service, I hate using the website itself. Yes, OK, you can update your Facebook status via Twitter, but I write different things on Facebook and Twitter, so I didn't want to go down that route. So, my solution? Write my own!

JabberStatus is a simple Ruby script which listens on a Jabber account and updates your Facebook status for you. You add facebook@jabber.org to your Jabber contact list, then it says hello and gives you instructions on what to do. You click a couple of URLs to give it access to your Facebook account, and that's it! Then you just send it status updates, and it posts them on Facebook for you. It's free for anyone to use, so give it a go!

Technically, it's pretty cunning though I say so myself. It stores Facebook session data for each person that talks to it in it's own Jabber contact list, so no backend database is required. Anyway, it's all open source so you can take a look yourself. You can even run your own instance of it. It's still under development (needs code tidying up, as well as better error handling), but it's out there working now, so have a go.