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How to Microblog From Your Gmail/Jabber

By Joshua Price

XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) is a IM system used by all kinds of chat clients, most notably Jabber and GMail. It’s open standard, allowing anyone to create a XMPP compatible chat programs. This gives it a flexibility not found in other chat systems like AIM and MSN Messenger. People have come up with some interesting uses for XMPP, and today we’ll be covering its use as a microblogging system.

Microblogging has because pretty popular recently with Twitter being the best known of these services. I personally haven’t signed up for Twitter specifically, however the basic concept has spread to other services. I’ve never been a big fan of personal blogging, but I’ve found over time that my GMail status messages tend to give a pretty good idea of what I’m up to. I also use the status message as an excuse to share some of my favorite quotes and links. A while back, I decided to try to record all of my status messages so that I could go back later and find an old link I posted, or see what day it was that I had made an announcement. I began looking online for a service that would automatically read my GMail status message and log it for future use.

I never found exactly what I was looking for, but I did find juick.com. Yes, it’s in Russian, but that actually doesn’t really cause a problem for what we’re going to be doing today.

Juick is a web service that takes XMPP messages and creates a microblog using those messages as entries in the blog. There’s no registration, no signup, no hassle. You simply send a XMPP message to “juick@juick.com” and it creates a blog based on the username you sent from and begins recording submissions.

  1. Add “juick@juick.com” to your contact list in your Jabber client or GMail.
  2. Prepare whatever message you want juick to record
  3. Send your message

That’s it. Juick will respond immediately telling you the message has been posted, and will provide you with a web address to view your new entry. To view your blog as a whole, send juick a message with just the word “LOGIN” (all caps) and it will reply with a link to your blog.

Example of a juick blog page

Without any hassle, I can now record all my witty remarks and Beastie Boys quotes in one place. Ideally, I’d like something that would automatically read my status messages and update the blog on its own, but with juick there’s just one additional step of pasting my status message into a chat box.

Those who have Twitter accounts may want to take a look at tweet.IM. I haven’t tried it as I don’t have a Twitter account, but it looks to be about the same type of thing as what we’ve talked about today.

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Joshua Price Avatar
Joshua Price
Josh Price is a senior MakeTechEasier writer and owner of Rain Dog Software

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