Recently I wrote about the difficulties of using e-mail/SMTP as a transport for Digital Identity interactions. However, these difficulties are not quite the same for instant messaging protocols such as XMPP (nee Jabber), and there are some interesting possibilities that so far haven’t been taken up by that community. In fact, I continue to be surprised that the Jabber community hasn’t grabbed the opportunity to take XMPP into many areas, other than instant messaging, such as:
- XMPP as a publish-subscribe (pub-sub) protocol for website changes.
- XMPP as a pub-sub protocol for RSS subscriptions.
- XMPP as a protocol for Ajax-style fine-grained data exchange to and from a server.
- XMPP as a transport for REST or SOAP-style web services that can traverse firewalls and that connects to the user, rather than a particular host (so you can say "send message X to user Y" instead of "send message X to host Z")
- XMPP URLs as identifiers for individuals, and XMPP as a transport for digital identity interactions.
XMPP, for example, has had support for VCards for a long time, and that support is built into most XMPP clients. The Jabber Software Foundation is even the (somewhat reluctant) steward of the XML-VCard specification that we refer to in LID. Of course, we do that because in LID, we have long recognized XMPP’s potential (and at NetMesh, we’ve had Jabber/XMPP support for a long time in our InfoGrid product and customers are using that to deliver real-time business events derived by InfoGrid from information in fragmented legacy systems).
There would be some issues that need resolving (e.g. the fact that standard web browsers are not IM-aware) but they are resolvable, at least much more so than for the case of e-mail.
Anybody in the XMPP/Jabber community reading this, and interested in collaborating? Anybody in the proprietary instant messaging community? ;-)