XMPP Happenings

by Peter Saint-Andre

2008-01-30

The last week or so has been a busy time for Jabber/XMPP technologies, and for my work on XMPP, too (thus the lack of posts). Among the daily news of support for XMPP in products and services as diverse as the Asterisk (more here), seesmic, Ribbit, the U.S. Marines, and yes even AOL (!), technologists are starting to grok that XMPP is a powerful, even foundational technology for the real-time Internet. Consider a few recent conversation threads in the blogosophere:

  1. Is XMPP the way to build open, distributed systems for social presence and microblogging? Input from Matt Terenzio, Dave Winer (who personally inspired Jabber-RPC way back in 2001), Jean-Marc Liotier, Ivan Campos, and others.
  2. Is XMPP the future of "cloud services" and machine-to-machine communication? Former XSF chairman Matt Tucker of Jive Software kicks off the conversation here and there are responses from Marshall Kirkpatrick, Jeff Whatcott, Wilhelm Chung, Daniel Andrlik, Mike Coyle, Dawn Foster, Rick Turoczy, and many assorted commenters.

Unfortunately, I haven't yet found the time to weigh in on these threads because I've been busy cranking out specifications to make all this go, including fun new applications of the XMPP Jingle extensions (currently used for voice and video negotiation) to things like file transfer and shared XML editing (think whiteboarding, collaborative XHTML authoring, etc.). Oh and I've also got plenty of action items from recent meetings of the XSF Board of Directors and XMPP Council. Not to mention hundreds of emails and IMs to answer, dozens of digital certificates to issue, numerous unfinished todo items, and so on. 2008 figures to be a busy year in the wonderful world of Jabber/XMPP technologies!


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