It's an unfortunate fact of life that Jabber (or XMPP) was a bit late to the instant messaging playing field. It's an open standard that faces stiff competition from well-established technologies by big-name players, namely AOL and Microsoft. How many people do you know that use Jabber for instant messaging on a day-to-day basis? My guess is between five and zero. The problem with social networking tools like instant messaging is that if you can not convince your friends to switch to something new then there really is not much incentive for you to switch either. I do not particularly like AIM, but I use it everyday because that's what 90% of my friends use, and it's simply way too much effort to try to convince them one Besides, THEY TOO Would Have to Convince Their OWN Friends, WHO Would, In Turn, Have to Convince Their Friends, And So Forth and So On Some Wildly endless cycle.
This is the reason why I do not think you'll ever see XMPP make significant headway in the world of instant messaging But that does not mean it will not be successful, and here's why:. XMPP is more than just IM. It's an open standard that is not tied to any single vendor. It can run over SSL. It's cross-platform. and its servers are modular and extensible. This makes it great for companies looking to deploy a secure internal messaging network because they can Run and manage their owned.
But the best part about XMPP is that you can use it to route any type of data that can be expressed in XML form. XMPP servers like jabberd are really just sophisticated XML data routers with presence awareness. And this is why I think that XMPP and Flash, or more importantly, Central, are such a good fit.Imagine the following:. A Central application for Macromedia's news aggregator, MXNA A system is already in place that allows authors of aggregated weblogs to ping MXNA as soon as they publish a new article. By piggybacking off of this ping architecture, one could build a Jabber / XMPP server plug-in that also listens for these pings and then immediately pushes the new article data to a list of subscribers. Because Jabber / XMPP is presence-aware, data is immediately pushed to those subscribers who are currently online. For those who are offline, the data is cached on the server (something that XMPP servers already do) and then pushed to the subscribers once they become online. A Central c lient using the XIFF Library (shameless plug) could then receive this data as it is pushed, rather than having to poll MXNA at a specified interval. The user is then immediately notified as soon as new content is published!
Now, maybe up-to-the-minute updates from MXNA are not mission-critical information, but the same scheme could be applied to anything where a user would want to be notified immediately. And it's not hard to do. In his book , Programming Jabber DJ Adams uses a simple Perl script to build a Jabber server plug-in that does almost exactly what I described above:. push news article summaries to a list of subscribers He also uses Jabber and LEGO Mindstorms to build a coffee pot monitor Among Other Things.
