Twitter is Jabber, Part II
So, both Dave and Robert Scoble raked me over the coals for daring to say that a popular service with lots of users could be done differently. I had some good back and forth comments in Scoble's comment thread, re-posted below.
- I don't plan on building a "Twitter killer" using Jabber
- I don't think Twitter should go away...just that they might want to look at using Jabber directly as their core, which has many open benefits not the least of which is an automatic federation model
- I don't claim that the entire Twitter community could be duplicated: yes, I understand "it's the users, stupid!"...I can still wish for technological improvements
From my comment on Robert's post:
I’d love to see a Jabber-to-Twitter API that means all the rest of us outside the walls of Twitter could interoperate, peer, and all that good stuff.
Building it around one company, no matter how many users it has, doesn’t seem like a particularly good idea.
Facebook implemented SMS notifications (”just like Twitter”) and has a TON of users. If we had a standard like Jabber in the middle, people could have joe@facebook.com accounts and jane@twitter.com accounts. And it would all just work
A note on Jabber/XMPP: XMPP is an open, IETF standard that has been used to implement a lot of IM-like functionality in the past. It also happens to be a protocol that’s great for passing around any sort of data where real time or publish and subscribe models make sense.
It’s all about the users: so make it so that ALL the users can talk to each other in a real federation model (which works today with Jabber), rather than being locked in Twitter’s trunk.
Robert's response:
Boris: now joining Facebook and Twitter sounds like a great opportunity! Building a bridge between two islands adds value. Trying to replace the islands doesn’t interest me at all. Building a third island that connects the other two? Good too! I guess it’s all in the semantics.
He goes on to say that "Twitter is NOT IM or SMS" and that he uses mainly the web interface. So...I agree. It's *the* area where Twitter has been innovating. A perfect thing to build on top of an open standard and add value.
Also left as a parting word in comments:
To me, XMPP is a real time version of RSS. That's the very shortest description I can make that also highlights the power and potential I think the protocol/standard itself has.
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Comments
In Principle, I Agree. :-)
Speaking as the senior developer at Twitter, federation of social software via Jabber is something I'd love to see happen. I'm going to start off by saying that it probably won't happen for a few months at least, if not longer, if ever. The truth is that we just don't know yet (by "we", I mean people who are building these tools, not Twitter per se). If you haven't already, check out my slides for Social Software for Robots, a talk that Kellan and I gave at XTech yesterday. It's worth underscoring that Twitter does in fact have a Jabber core, and we expose API data in the Jabber message stanzas that we send. There are a number of apps that use Twitter's Jabber endpoint for API access, and we strongly encourage developers to use Jabber to talk to us, since it's way easier for us in many respects, and provides a better experience for our users. I'm going to be speaking to Ralph Meijer who's working at Jaiku about possible directions for federation while I'm here at XTech, but until they have a Jabber endpoint up and running, and until we can get the details for authentication and authorization (i.e., how do we do "So and so would like to be your friend"?) nailed down, it's a bit of a non-starter. There are also a number of user interface questions that need to be nailed down, in general. I've been saying in private conversation for some time now that Twitter really is just a subset of the Jabber protocols - the trick is, it's the only implementation that anyone's ever used in public. We're talking to Peter Saint Andre and folks at Process-One to make sure that our implementation helps bolster the Jabber commmunity, and promotes Jabber as a viable and rich protocol for web and internet application development. As an aside, in response to those who are concerned about the requirement for your own Jabber server to run a simple jabber-connected microblogging app, just use gmail. Seriously, it works, and it's stable and it takes about 30 seconds to get going. I've also written and released Jabber::Simple, a Ruby library that makes coding Jabber bots trivial. I hope that helps! :-)
Jabber + Jaiku + Twitter
I'm a designer/developer with the Etoile project, and we've been working on an IM client (and some background tools, all in our SVN) that will send your presence messages to the microblogging site of your choice (Jaiku, Twitter). Unifying presence messages and microblogging (or, rather, turning presence messages into a sort of publishable log) seems like an obvious step, and the point at which IM and blogging most closely intersect.
Was Just Thinking...
You've been banging the Jabber/XMPP drum a heck of a long time Boris... what, 6 or 7 years at least. Crazy how time flies... (You'd be happy to know that there is a Jabber server in operation within Nortel...)