That's hilarious! But jokes about PHP scripts and internet appliances aside, there *is* a real solution to this that's already accepted by the community at large.
It's called XMPP - eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol. Thanks to Google and Livejournal there's already a huge userbase. It's inter-server, so all those @gmail.com users can use any federated XMPP service, and federation is easy. Many services already offer XMPP access to their data, especially microblogging services like twitter and identi.ca. It doesn't matter what XMPP server you connect to (ie, gmail.com). If a feature isn't already supported by XMPP you can write an extension. Thanks to existing and well-deployed standards like pubsub ( http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0060.html) many new services don't need to extend XMPP for their new functionality. Facebook has flirted with XMPP in the past, they're currently planning to add support just for Facebook IM. There are already a number of XMPP gateway apps for Facebook hosted by 3rd parties. In Facebook's defense, they have an open API and allow anyone to host Facebook apps on their own servers that can access user's information and which have equal access to publish snippets to friend's pages. There are many libraries to work with Facebook's API. So a new model capable of obsoleting the existing paradigms, being as it must interoperate, is best implemented as XMPP service software.
_______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
