Instant Messaging 2.0
Posted by James | Filed under Code, Future, Mobile, Privacy, Social, Web
There are some interesting things going on in the world of Instant Messaging these days. There is potentially going to be a shift from proprietary networks to ones built on an open standard called Jabber (aka XMPP, Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol). The technical details of Jabber which I’ll example below, make this a very big deal.
The biggest IM providers are MSN, AOL, Yahoo, and Google. For years, the first three operated proprietary, closed protocols. If you are logged in to AOL, you can’t talk to people logged in to MSN (there have been some efforts to link these networks; but in a such a way that the closed protocols are still used). You can’t reuse your contacts across accounts, just as MySpace contacts can’t be reused by Facebook (until DataPortability.org gets going maybe…).
Then Google entered the game. Instead of creating their own IM protocol, they implemented an existing well known IM protocol originally called Jabber, now called XMPP. XMPP had been around for a while and had been implemented most notably by several enterprise collaboration suite providers. But Google implementing it caused the big three to wake up and take notice.
Tags: instant messaging, jabber, open standard, protocols, xmpp
Welcome to Jimmahdigital.com, personal blog of James Simm, Wigan/Manchester-based .Net developer.
