Hab.la: multi-login work-arounds, connectivity issues

Posted by admin on January 4th, 2008 filed in Google Talk, Hab.la, IM, Jabber, Meebo, Pidgin, chat, widgets

More on ‘multi-login’

In a previous post I discussed the potential for multiple staffers to monitor the same Hab.la chat box(es) simultaneously, either through the same Meebo account or via different Meebo accounts. A question from Mark Lenker and Nathan Landis at Longwood U has lead me to discover that doing this “through the same Meebo account” doesn’t work anymore.

What happened?

I had a chat with someone at Hab.la who told me that ‘multi-login’ was a side effect of a bug, and never did work properly. Hab.la fixed the bug in question, and behold the multi-login ‘feature’ is no more… sort of.

Hab.la’s work-around (not Meebo-friendly)

My Hab.la contact told that multi-login can kind of work if one has the ability to set the priority on all of one’s IM clients (or on one’s own and on one’s co-workers’ IM clients) to the same value. I’m told that on desktop clients (e.g., Pidgin) this option is generally found under the advanced settings. If there’s a Pidgin (or other desktop IM client) enthusiast out there who’d like to test this out, I’d love to hear from you. Alas, I can’t find that option in Meebo.

Mark & Nathan’s (Meebo-friendly) work-around

I also tested to see whether or not ‘multi-login’ was still working working “via different Meebo accounts”. Because of how I’d entered my Hab.la screen name into my two Meebo accounts, multi-login wasn’t working.

Mark and Nathan have found a great little work-around. Quoting Nathan:

“It appears that Google Talk and Hab.la are both based on the Jabber IM technology. Jabber allows you to login to your account with your account name followed by a slash and the session name (I believe Google Talk generates their own location). To login to multiple locations, I simply added a slash and a unique identifier when I added my Jabber account in my second Meebo account.”

So, for my 1st Meebo account I used the Jabber screen name dan’s-userid@hab.la. Meebo added the location /Meebo to the end, yielding dan’s-userid@hab.la/Meebo. For my 2nd Meebo account, I used a different Jabber screen name, dan’s-userid@hab.la/monkeys. Including the location /monkeys prevented the Meebo default location of /Meebo from being added.

Why multi-login matters

If someone else wanted to monitor my Hab.la widgets, they could. All they would need is their own IM client, my Hab.la userid and my Hab.la password. In their IM client they would add my Jabber screen name dan’s-userid@hab.la along with a unique location.

For library chat reference purposes, staffers Bob & Doug could monitor their library’s generic Hab.la account through their own Meebo accounts, using Jabber screen names hoserlibchat@hab.la/bob and hoserlibchat@hab.la/doug. Using people’s names as the locations is one approach.

Hab.lag

On a separate note, Hab.la’s been lagging something awful lately. I’ve seen this before, but never this bad. Widgets are taking far too long to load (if they load at all) and don’t always accurately reflect one’s status when they do load. The same Hab.la programmer was already looking into the problem when I chatted with him, and thought he’d identified the problem as a ‘concurrancy issue’ with their RPC server. (Indeed, things appear to be working nicely at the time of my writing this sentence.)