Microblogging Over XMPP

by Peter Saint-Andre

2008-05-07

There's been plenty of talk recently about using XMPP to build a decentralized microblogging platform (think Twitter busted apart to run as a distributed network of microblogging providers). Indeed, as Bob Wyman points out, we have all the pieces:

• The core XMPP infrastructure, comprised of 100,000+ messaging and presence servers plus millions of end users.
• The XMPP publish-subscribe extension, specifically the personal eventing profile thereof, which enables your IM account to function as a virtual pubsub service and thus push out all sorts of notifications about you.
• The Atom syndication format along with the Atom threading extension, which (being XML) is easily transported over XMPP.

Now it's just a matter of putting the pieces together, so Joe Hildebrand and I have done just that in a little spec we call Microblogging Over XMPP. Feedback is welcome!

UPDATE: While I was at it, I pushed out a new version of draft-saintandre-atompub-notify. Enjoy!

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