MySpace IM is popular – as many as twenty percent of users on the site at any time are also logged in to their IM client. But it’s only available via a download for Windows machines, locking out everyone else. There is no official MySpace support for webchat or non-Windows clients.
Pidgin, Trillian and eBuddy have announced support for MySpace IM via a reverse engineering of their proprietary text-based protocol. The version of Trillian that supports MySpace, however, is in private beta, and I have never been able to get eBuddy to work properly with MySpace IM.
So if you really, really want MySpace webchat, you can now use unofficialmyspaceim, a new flash based site build by Prasad Mahendra. I tested it, it works. I even had a somewhat unsatisfying chat with MySpace co-founder Tom Anderson.
Beware – you have to enter your MySpace credentials to use the service, and there’s no guarantee this service won’t use them for, well, anything they want.
Also, you may not have to wait too long for official Mac and webchat versions of MySpace IM. Rumor is they’re already working on it.
Woo!
Adium supports MySpace IM.
RE: “Beware – you have to enter your MySpace credentials to use the service, and there’s no guarantee this service won’t use them for, well, anything they want.”
Fear not …
Technical Info on how this flash app works:
The flash client uses the same authentication mechanism that the official myspace-im desktop client does. A myspace user’s username and password is never exchanged between the flash client and the myspace-im server verbatim and cannot be stored anywhere by unofficialmyspace.com (a network trace can be done to verify this easily) even though there is a server in the middle that proxies / relays the flash applications connection to the myspace-im servers.
Application Architecture:
flash app proxy – myspace-im service
The proxy simply relays the messages to the myspace-im servers. I had to do this unfortunately to serve up the flash policy files required to make the flash application work.
The proxy is a erlang server wth 156 lines of code. send me a message via myspace (myspace username: unofficialmyspaceim) and I’ll gladly share the proxy source code.
Application Architecture:
flash app (–) proxy (–) myspace-im service
… people are far to quick to enter user/pass info on unaffiliated sites. The trend is increasing and needs to be discouraged, not encouraged. (So I applaud the disclaimer you added.)
The timing of the post on the other hand…
…
… curious to know how many people clicked this thinking it was related to the MySpace changes that are supposed to be occurring today.
o_o
Oh walled gardens are so great. Why are they not using jabber/XMPP and saving themselves the trouble of writing a client for every target platform?
woo!
Woo!
Adium X supports MySpace IM and has for sometime now
Besides My Space… It has announced that Adium now supports Facebook chat as well.
I love how they didn’t bother to skin the Flex components at all, Pure Flex coding pleasure
That pretty cool i guess i like myspace, and as a Mac user i would like to beable to use IM. The only thing is with so many IM chooses I have never missed out on not being able to use it.
Pidgin supports myspace IM for a loooong time now, but it is linux/windows only. However, several commenters have mentioned Adium supports it too. So, what’s the point of this?
“Beware – you have to enter your MySpace credentials to use the service, and there’s no guarantee this service won’t use them for, well, anything they want.” – TechCrunch
“A myspace user’s username and password is never exchanged between the flash client and the myspace-im server verbatim and cannot be stored anywhere by unofficialmyspace.com” – unofficialmyspace.com replies
“The proxy is a erlang server wth 156 lines of code. send me a message via myspace (myspace username: unofficialmyspaceim) and I’ll gladly share the proxy source code.” – unofficialmyspace.com adds
OK dudes… Thanks but I’ll prefer to stick with desktop clients such as Pidgin (Windows / Linux) and Adium (Mac)
>> Hey Tom, how’s Myspace doing against those pesky spam bots?
Tom: woo!
>> heh, how’s OpenSocial workin’ out for you?
Tom: woo!
>> Think Facebook will own you guys in DAU and uniques?
Tom: woo!
>> Are your numbers inflated due to spam?
Tom: woo!
>> Are you scared of Facebook?
Tom: woo!
Who is Prasad Mahendra? Is it a MySpace employee?
SG
I dont see really the need for a flash chat on MYspace.
though they I see that this service is getting more popular these days
check this http://www.flashcoms.com
I have come across about a thousand of such websites while browsing through internet searching for professional help in this sphere
I don’t know how clever that is ‘reveres engineered text based protocol…’ If MySpace doesn’t want to open up their IM they can change their protocol as whenever and as often as they want to lock out any third party. Or do I miss something here?
Ow!
My Web 0.2 contribution to this post…
http://www.jogt...php?trackId=102
“Beware – you have to enter your MySpace credentials to use the service, and there’s no guarantee this service won’t use them for, well, anything they want.”
Michael, Olubi, Trench — if you’re going to warn us about unofficialmyspaceim, why not the same warning about Pidgin, Adium, or Trillion? Couldn’t these desktop clients be storing/re-using your login credentials just the same as a web-app? Have you performed the network trace to make sure they haven’t?
It’s unfair to hold web-based apps to a different standard than client apps, both of which might ask for your username and password. There’s no security different between one kind of app over the other, and both could just as easily be storing your password for illicit purposes.
In both cases, you should use the overall reputation of the product, its authors, and other users to make a decision about trusting an app with your password – not whether it happens to be web-based.