I was very pleased to see Russell Beattie's recent posting suggesting that his employer, Yahoo! should consider supporting Jabber/XMPP now that Google has decided to support this open IETF protocol. After years of closed and proprietary IM networks, it may be that we can finally start looking forward to the same ease of interconnection that we have in our email networks. (Yes, we need to address the spam issues in IM too...) We've been using Jabber/XMPP in our PubSub Sidebars for quite some time now and we're not surprised at all that Google has found this protocol to be a good foundation to build on. I'm hoping the other services follow suit soon.
It's time to start eliminating the walled-gardens and build systems more in line with the way the Internet was intended to work! Standards, not proprietary systems, are what we should be in our critical communications systems.
One thing is very clear at this point. The ranks of Jabber/XMPP developers are going to explode. Since Jabber/XMPP networks, including Google's, are very open it is trivial for developers to build and deploy Jabber/XMPP clients. Now that Google has brought the entire base of Gmail users into the Jabber world, XMPP developers finally have an "installed base" large enough for them to justify investing the time and effort to build really innovative systems. Developers can now finally stop whining about interconnecting with Microsoft and AOL since they now have a large enough user base to work with. Thus, the Instant Messaging space, which until now has really not supported significant innovation and experimentation by anyone other than the large established providers of propriety and closed networks, may now see some really exciting tools and products developed.
Of course, we at PubSub are hoping that when these newly empowered developers and dreamers start building their systems that they will consider supporting the Jabber/XMPP extensions that define PubSub support (JEP-0060). Why stop at building just a chat client when you can also build a full publish/subscribe client? To learn how to use Jabber/XMPP to connect to PubSub.com for instant notification of content in web feeds, take a look at our "Tutorial" on PubSub's support for XMPP. (Note: I know it needs to be updated...)
bob wyman
Fantastic statement Bob... I've been using XMPP since the beginning and count myself amongst the (unfortunately) scarce population of XMPP developers on the scene right now. I am witnessing a mini-revolution amongst my development team as they are suddenly realizing the potential available from the technology. We are coming in to exciting times, indeed.
Posted by: Casey Whittaker | August 25, 2005 at 01:03
Great post Bob. At Tribe today we run a Jabber server and support Jabber client connections. We haven't gone the route of fully supporting this yet so it does require Tribe members who really want to take advantage of this to download a Jabber client and getting running and connected properly w/very lil' help fm Tribe (it's a resource issue for us right now). However, we went this route because of our belief in an open and interconnected world. Obviously, this Google announcement makes us happy that perhaps this direction will enable us to interconnect and communicate w/others sooner than we had anticipated.
...next step, hopefully to open up our events, listings, recommendations/reviews into structured blogging world :-)
Posted by: P-Air | August 31, 2005 at 14:47