[Markov_AU]

I've been poking around on xfire.com, and notice while there was a bit of a push for MUDs to be included there, they have not done so, dose anyone know of a messenger service that would work and track MUDing and servers (integrated on the client end maybe, or just MUDs in general. That is similar?

[Tezcatlipoca]

Just about any social client (messangers, trackers, etc.) that have plugin capabilities could be extended to do so really. The main problem is getting a "master server" of MUD servers to contact and receive updates from. Since so such thing exists you would have to have the device require the user to input each MUD they want to watch, and then be limited to.. well just pinging the mud in most circumstances. Some MUDs may provide options to access "who" lists and such for websites that you could ask for as well, but those would probably each be implemented differently for every code-base, and each MUD may have different permission rules set up for access (most probably just make them accessable for their own MUD).

I actually work as a developer for a similar program that's focused primarilly on voice communications. While I can tell you that I wouldn't be able to convince anyone to build it directly into the client (between the above problems and just the general concept of it not really being enticing enough for the company), it will be possible to write a plugin to do something along those lines; even a plugin that will act as a MUD client and let you connect and play through the program extensions.

As a last thought, you might be able to leverage the power of the IMC protocol, or Inter-Mud-Chat that was initiated back in the 90s for (I think) primarilly DiKU code bases. However, the number of MUDs that actually used it I think was fairly limited.