Getting Twitter and Google hosted domains to talk over Gtalk

I was quite irritated to find out recently that if you have a Google hosted domain and use that to login to Gtalk, you cannot communicate with Twitter without jumping through a few hoops, and even then, only under certain conditions. My first thought was that “these sort of things” should just work (tm). Turns out I was really wrong …

Kavinda explains in detail how to get this setup the right way.

Here is the executive summary:

Unlike what is probably thought by some (like me earlier)Twitter is not logged into Gtalk to talk to you. It uses XMPP/Jabber to talk to you. If you have logged into gtalk with your own domain name, how do you think twitter knows that it needs to send the message to gtalk’s servers? As Joe Beda explains, it is almost like SMTP. So instead of MX records, Twitter looks up your SRV records from DNS. So to talk to Twitter (and other such apps that will be using this mechanism in the future), you need to setup SRV records for your domain. And that means you need to have complete control over your domain’s DNS records.

Unfortunately, that leaves me out of the Twitter-via-IM scene. I use a managed DNS service from ResellerClub, which uses the otherwise wonderful Logicboxes interface. However Logicboxes doesn’t allow you to edit SRV records for your domain yet. :( I hope someone high up in Directi sees my plight and makes this one of the highest business priorities in Logicboxes. Not likely. :P

Sigh!

General
Tech specific feed of this blog The POTA games