On Sat Jul 10 22:39:23 2010, Yves Goergen wrote:
Sometime in the last decade I saw a more or less great momentum
towards
open IM standards, with Google Talk and GMX/web.de introducing XMPP
services or Apple iChat supporting the protocol. Recently, Facebook
also
joined the club (without s2s AFAIK), but I have the vague impression
that the whole thing slowly falls asleep. There hasn't been real
great
leaps in the near past, or did I just miss them? Now even Google
tries
to introduce yet another messaging protocol that isn't as verbose
as XML
[citation needed].
Okay. Some observations:
1) There was a period in the recent past when virtually any major
organization with an online presence needed IM. Whenever that's
happened in recent years, they've picked up XMPP instead of rolling
their own. There's fewer big names left that haven't got IM one way
or another now, hence less noise to make - this will always be the
most visible XMPP headline news. Less obvious is the BBC's recent
deployment, for web purposes, and many similar ones.
2) XMPP deployment - in the IM space - is massive. Every major
software supplier in the IM space now provides XMPP - through
gateways in the cases of MSFT and IBM, but still XMPP. Although
corporate enterprise IM has a strong contigent of OCS, there's a
significant portion of "pure" XMPP there, and in the
government/military space, XMPP is very much a hot topic.
3) In terms of movement in the specifications - new extensions, etc -
we're moving fast enough that it's actually quite hard to keep up,
across the board - we're certainly seeing clients specializing into
various areas, and I think it's happening to an increasing extent for
servers, too - even if I think all of the server implementors would
generally say they're unspecialized for now.
4) I would note that, as far as I can tell (bearing in mind I've not
worked with XMPP specifically for as long as many others in this
thread), there are about the same number of clients and servers under
active, vibrant development as there have been for ages. The
population of the set is volatile - but the numbers seem pretty
stable.
5) In terms of Google specifically - Google is a large, broad-based,
company with a momentum all of its own. Very much like Microsoft,
it's important to remain objective when looking at what they're
doing. So while Google have insisted (on multiple occasions) that
XMPP, using XML, is way too verbose (and therefore power hungry) for
mobile, I'd note that by contrast Nokia's use of XMPP to the handset
appears to be entirely standards-based.
So in summary, although XMPP's progress and successes are a lot less
newsworthy, and the landscape is almost unrecognizable compared to a
few years ago, it's no less vibrant, and the future for XMPP is only
disappointing because it's a descent into mundane ubiquity.
Dave.
--
Dave Cridland - mailto:[email protected] - xmpp:[email protected]
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