* for information on how to link zopim up with your favorite IM (Gtalk, MSN, Yahoo, AIM) networks, please read this earlier post.

To start off this post, Zopim doesn’t just allow you to reply to customers on your website via Instant Messaging (IM) clients, we also allow you to use commands and access information that will be important in helping you close a sale. Recently we’ve powered up our IM offering by rolling out some highly-requested features.

Chat Request Information

Those of you who frequently chat with visitors via IM clients may have noticed these new features being silently rolled out a few weeks ago. For starters, whenever chat requests are made on your webpage, you will see a lot more information about the visitor, including:

• IP Address
• Country, Region, City
• Current Page URL
• Email (if available)
• Notes (if available)

Page Surfing Information

Also, during a conversation, you will be notified as the visitor is moving from page to page. Now, you will know the context of a conversation and be able to customize your response based on the page your visitor is currently on.

Help Command

As with before, you can list the available commands using the command #help (screenshot above). The old commands include #shortcuts, which lists the shortcuts you’ve created on the dashboard and #end, which ends your current chat. The new commands we’ve added allows you to set the name, email and notes of the visitor you’re chatting with.

New Commands

The screenshot above shows #setname, #setemail and #setnotes in action. The next time this visitor returns to your site, you will be able to access the same information regardless of whether you’re on the dashboard or on your favorite IM client.

This short blog post concludes our new IM feature additions. Do write to us at feedback@zopim.com to let us know what you think!

At ZopIM we believe that every visitor on your website is invaluable. TLC should be showered on them no matter where you are or what you’re doing. We also believe that you should not have to alter your working habits to serve your customers. So having to install extra software on your computer, or being permanently logged in a web page to monitor traffic on your website is a huge NO NO for us.

It didn’t take us long to realize how painful it was to constantly monitor our visitors in the desktop view. We also realized that the only application that is always open in everyone’s terminal is their IM client. Being the biggest fans and users of ZopIM, we must confess that IM integration has made our product much more usable, and significantly increased our response times (Guess how we manage to talk to you even when you come in at 4am in the morning).

Right now we are only able to notify you via IM when a visitor has entered your site or requests to chat with you, but the ability to directly respond to your visitors from your IM client is already in development, so stay tuned!

This integration however, wasn’t exactly a piece of cake and thus this post is dedicated to those who went through the same journey we did, and any developer who might want to explore IM integration with their projects

Iteration 1: Jabber server with transports to other networks…. and why this solution sucks

In ZopIM’s previous version which was written in Java and the Jetty web server using cometd techniques (why we’ve ditched this calls for another blog post.. when I finally muster the energy to write it), we used the Smack XMPP client libraries (which were very nice IMO) to talk to Jabber which connected to the various IM networks using transport service libraries. However from our experience this solution simply sucks for the following reasons:

1. The transport libraries were outdated and not actively maintained. Libraries provided by the py-transports group are by far the most updated, and it can be seen that their activity is still extremely low.
2. Related to reason 1, many things just didn’t work transparently. Adding a buddy in MSN sometimes failed, and in Yahoo, it just didn’t seem to work. The whole point of using jabber is to not have to care about the underlying transport network… this just sucked
3. Maybe still related to 1 and 2, roster and presence management didn’t seem to work at all for the other transports… Nothing happened no matter what I did when buddies changed their statuses
4. Maybe I got too pissed off by now to tweak the setup or configure it properly. It was a MEMORY HOG. Unforgivable. Jabberd ended up chomping up hundreds of mbs of RAM after long periods of use. SIMPLY UNFORGIVABLE.

The only thing that worked well was message sending/receiving, but otherwise… this solution just sucked. We ditched it after about 4 months and have moved to a much more scalable and elegant solution: libpurple!!!

Anyway that’s it for part one, stay tuned!!