JabberConf-erring

by Peter Saint-Andre

2002-06-14

Yow, woke up late this morning and missed Jeremie's talk. Joe Hildebrand is giving a talk right now entitled "A Day in the Life of a Jabber Developer" with a fun Beatles thread (woke up, fell out of bed, dragged a comb across my head...). At the end of my talk this morning about the Jabber Software Foundation I asked who has a weblog (not enough!) and Doc followed up by asking who is blogging the conference live. He is, so I figured I'd do so as well. :)

Some aha moments for me at the conference so far:

  1. We need to make greater use of jabber:x:data -- there is a lot of potential here to extend Jabber in the same way that HTML forms greatly extended the World Wide Web.
  2. Dale Malik of BellSouth pointed out that 95% of people prefer real-time chat with customer service representatives as opposed to telephone interactions. We need better website integration!
  3. The Jabber network is key. There are thousands of Jabber servers but it's not easy to find them all. How do we encourage people to "come out of the closet" and improve service discovery and directories on the Jabber network?
  4. Web services right now consists of synchronous request-response interactions over HTTP. Sure they're structured with XML-RPC and SOAP, but Jabber's asynchronous nature and live presence capabilities make possible new kinds of web services (or "Jabber services"), such as transactional "conversations" like workflow processing or trading systems.
  5. Our discussions about publish/subscribe protocols were fruitful (I'll post more about it soon to standards-jig@jabber.org). Once we get the protocols worked out, we'll see cool services like better notification services (e.g., auction updates), transporting NNTP traffic over Jabber, and so on.
  6. We might want to modify the JEP process (i.e., JEP-0001) so that a JEP doesn't pass unless a majority of Jabber Council members vote +1.
  7. \We need to learn more about the Wireless Village spec and get involved in those conversations. Philip Littlejohn of WV was here at JabberConf and gave us a good introduction to their initiative.
  8. I chatted with Kent Sandoe of Cal State University as well as Martin and Jiri from the Knowledge Media Institute about interest in Jabber within academia. I promised them we'd set up a dedicated mailing list at jabber.org to discuss these topics, since Jabber can help build learning environments and also provides a great technology that students can use for research purposes.

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