Ping and Publish Using GTalk and IMified

Did you know you can use Google Talk to do a whole lot more than send instant messages. By adding imified@imified.com to your Buddy list and installing the IMified network lookup widget, you can use the GoogleTalk IM window like a network command line tool.

Type “whois sciencetext.com” without the quotes, and you will get the whois information in the chat window for this, or whichever site you choose.

Try “alexa sciencetext.com” and, you guessed it, you’ll get the Alexa results for the domain. Please don’t though, Sciencetext doesn’t do too badly, but we are not quite on a par with Amit yet.

Traceroute and Ping also work so you can find the path from your internet connection to a remote site, or check the vital statistics of an address.

IMified also allows you to post to your Blogger or Wordpress blog, add updates to your Twitter account (although there is a Skype alternative for doing that), and even add favorites to your del.icio.us account.

As a word of caution, while I am fairly sure IMified is safe to use, please take into account the following statement they make on their site before IMifying any sensitive transactions:

“Imified stores information on our servers using industry strength AES 128 bit encryption.”

Not 256, then?

“Our servers are located in a secure data center in the Rocky Mountains. Your data is safe with us.”

Hmmm. Those old Rockies will keep hackers at bay will they? I don’t think so. Nice tool nevertheless, just be cautious of using it for anything mission critical, financial or Pentagon related.

Thanks to Amit Agarwal for bringing the new GTalk/IMified features to our attention in his Labnol blog.