Access Meebo via Bitlbee or a Jabber Client

I have a web-page where I integrated the Meebo plug-in. It’s handy because it allows quick instant messaging with your page’s visitors, rather than asking them to contact you via MSN or some other IM protocol and waiting for requests to be accepted. Despite Meebo’s convenience, I’ve been frustrated that in order to take advantage of this service I have to log into the Meebo page and that I don’t have access via one of my multi-protocol apps –or so I thought.

When I learned that Meebo uses the XMPP (Jabber) protocol, I experimented connecting to Meebo by using the Jabber client called Coccinella, Psi and Bitlbee. I was successful.

Coccinella Instructions
Create a profile, do not use “New Account” as this doesn’t allow you to specify the Meebo username. To so this, at startup select Profile, give it a name such as Meebo, specify the jabber server to meebo.org, input your Meebo username and password, and throw in “Home”as the resource. Select “Less” and “SASL authentification method” under “Use Secure Connection”(under the “Connection” tab). Other than that, the only other selection that should be activated is “Scramble password” under the “Login” tab. Save your preferences when done and log-in.

The only caveats are that you need to delete the Meebo visitor after he surfs off your page, at which point he becomes listed as off-line. The other seems to be a OS X specific issue in which Spotlight is activated evoking a window manifestation when your contact IMs. This happens initially and only once.

Coccinella allows you to log into various protocols, but adding various servers or profiles seems less intuitive if at all supported (I see no “log-in during startup” selection under the profile’s preferences to enable simultaneous multiple server/profile log-ins). To be useful, I need to login to various servers, including Google Talk, and Meebo, which –as far as I see– are not regularly supported with transports (transports or gateways are the “things” on servers that allow connections to various IM protocols). In short, if I connect to a Jabber server called –say– MyJabberServer.org and it does not have a MSN transport, well, this would bar me from connecting to the MSN network for the session (until I logged in again with another server that supports MSN). There are clients that allow multiple server connections. By the way, Psi does, so that you can use the Google Talk talk.google.com server (your Google Talk account, a XMPP protocol based service), the Meebo meebo.org server (another XMPP protocol based service), and just any ordinary Jabber server along with your MSN, AIM, ICQ and Yahoo accounts.

Notes on Getting Meebo Working with Psi
I will not narrate how to get Psi working with Meebo as the above Coccinella example serves as a general guide. In short, you need to specifiy the following.

Host: meebo.org
Port: 5222
Select “Encrypt When Available”
Allow plaintext authentication: “Over encrypted connection or Always”
Do not select “SSL encryption”.
Note: (Doesn’t show subscribed rooms until someone contacts you. As default, a window doesn’t pop-up when contacted either.)

Bitlbee Instructions
Following up on my previous HOWTO on Bitlbee interoperability, I got Meebo working with Bitlbee too but deleting the continuous stream of contacts –as they log-off– might be frustrating. Of course, this depends on the amount of traffic your site receives, but if you’re getting that much congestion you need another service such as email. I added Meebo to Bitlbee the following way, in a one line command,

• account add jabber username@meebo.org/Home yourPassword meebo.org:5222

It was also accepted without the “/Home” bit. Experiment at your own risk, seems my logging in with the Meebo plug-in on my page on SeaMonkey caused a crash. Suffixing “:ssl” disables Bitlbee’s ability to log on; Bitlbee reports “Login error: Unable to connect” and signs off –so don’t request “ssl”. Bitlbee needs a script to automize off-line Meebo contact deletion in real time. The other option would be selectively allow off-line Meebo contacts show presence on the roster. Thus, one could manually delete them as they take off-line status (assuming that Meebo contact names are not recycled in which case rendering deletion unnecessary). This might be manageable if “only Meebo contacts” show as off-line, as enabling off-line visibility for all IM accounts would become unmanageable; This, due to the sheer number of off-line contacts at any given time and the needle in the haystack scenario contact deletion involves (I reported this as a bug). To lighten this quandary, unix commands could help as in, “blist all | grep @hotmail.com” or “blist all | grep hotmail.com”, or “blist all xaccount” to list all (off and on-line) xaccount contacts (I reported this as an enhancement request).

I guess this guide comes close to answering this Meebo user’s wish. Except in the Bitlbee example we replace his desired Jabber server with Bitlbee (specifically, IRC client to Bitlbee server to Meebo server). While there are fewer links with the Jabber client route … we bypass any Jabber server entirely and connect directly to Meebo’s server (Jabber client to Meebo server).

Maurice Cepeda

P.S.
I tried this with Adium’s Google Talk and Jabber plug-ins but these don’t work because they don’t allow Meebo username and password input, and add-in “@gmail.com” or “jabber.org” to your Meebo username –thus, rendering the function useless. Rather than write another plug-in, why not just allow better setting customization as with Psi, with a Meebo check mark option automizing contact deletion? (Adium is more or less Pidgin ported to OS X.)

For developers,
Protocol: XMPP
Domain: meebo.org
Resource: Home
Connect port: 5222
Connect server: meebo.org

As for references, they were useful in clueing me into the XMMP protocol and and port 5222. There is a Pidgin plug-in written that automates contact deletion. Perhaps this can be incorporated into Bitlbee and other “clones”.

http://jrpomeroy.com/pidgin/
http://oshelpdesk.org/?p=256

Misc
Google Talk Notes
Google’s Google Talk guide for third party apps doesn’t help anymore, thus my point form guide:

Google Talk on Psi
Host: talk.google.com
Port: 5223
Allow plaintext authentification: “Over encrypted connection or Always”
“Use SSL encryption” (to server) or the like.

Spark
Meebo works on Spark but Google Talk does not, at least not for me.

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