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stpeter's blog on jabber, technology, history, philosophy, language, music, et al.

Maturity and Diversity in the XMPP EcosystemNovember 5

Eric Marcoullier of Gnip recently announced that they were winding down their XMPP support. Both Marshall Kirkpatrick and Stowe Boyd found this surprising, given that Gnip’s customers seem to be crying for the real-time data that an XMPP firehose would provide (and despite the fact that services like Yahoo Fire Eagle are busy ramping up their XMPP support).

I find Eric’s reasoning to be a bit flawed. First he says that the XMPP ecosystem is immature because there are too many XMPP server implementations, in contrast to the simpler world of HTTP servers where Apache dominates. Yet the email ecosystem is quite mature and has no one dominant server implementation (the current stats at mailradar.com are Sendmail 24%, Postfix 20%, qmail 17%, Microsoft Mail 15%, and exim 13%).

It’s true that there are quite a few XMPP server implementations, but only about half a dozen of them are serious players and some

A Sign of the TimesNovember 4

I’m happy to say that Cisco has completed its acquisition of Jabber, Inc. My start date at Webb Interactive Services (original parent of Jabber, Inc.) was November 1, 1999, and my start date at Cisco was October 31, 2008. Just a day shy of 9 years! I’m looking forward to many more years of working on Jabber, XMPP, and real-time communication.

For auld lange syne I figured I’d post a photo of the lobby sign at the Jabber Inc. offices. :)

Jabber.org Privacy PolicyOctober 15

We’ve never had a privacy policy regarding the jabber.org IM service, but I’m trying to change that. A draft policy is at http://xmpp.org/xsf/privacy.shtml and your feedback is welcome before the Board of the XMPP Standards Foundation votes on it.

Open is BetterOctober 12

The Free Software Foundation has added the following to its high priority list:

Free software replacement for Skype

Skype is a proprietary Voice-over-IP program that uses a proprietary protocol. Skype is seducing free software users into using proprietary software, often two users at a time. We do not want to encourage the creation of a Skype compatible client, but instead, we want to encourage you to create, contribute to, or promote the use of free software alternatives to Skype, such as Ekiga, and to encourage to adoption and use of free VoIP, video, and chat protocols such as SIP and XMPP/Jingle.

Hmm, maybe this is why?

In the XMPP community we’ve been making quite a bit of progress lately on Jingle, so I’m looking forward to building open replacements for black-box technologies like Skype.

Open is better.

Jabber Comes Alive!October 2

For years, Doc Searls and his son Allen have been talking about the live web. Sadly, one of the most dynamic corners of the ‘net — the real-time developer community centered around jabber.org — has been old and static (at least when it comes to the web). That’s about to change. Today in the webteam chatroom we had a lively discussion (pardon the pun) about how to enliven the jabber.org web experience. Expect a radically dynamic new interface soon, with live chatrooms powered by speeqe, microblogging feeds, and just a few static pages for reference purposes. The design is still emerging, but I really like the ideas we’re working to make real. Join the conversation!