One of the cool things

Yes, as Peter wrote, we now have all the pieces to create XMPP 2.0. And believe me, as I see it, he will for sure keep adding to an already impressive list of tribal sign posts: geo-location, mood, activity, tune, nickname. Not to mention those much more indiscrete privacy teasers: chatting, browsing, gaming, viewing…

On a side note, what strikes me is the low level of interest shown by the web 2.0 crowd in leveraging these killer features. But, thinking of it, lack of vision has always been very common in any kind of 'rush' (gold rush, oil rush, web 2.0 rush…). To be fair, it is understandable. Figuring out how to make money from something popular is a lot easier than making something popular. And using XMPP applications is not yet popular. It would require a mindset shift to go from static location based web to something more dynamic…

Going back to the protocol, these late JEPs look more like quick and dirty last hour additions than the expected result of a matured specification process. By chance, the frantic creativity that brought these many "extended social presence states" to XMPP is still reasonably limited compared to other standardization initiatives. I am just a little disappointed that these JEPs have not led to a better rationalization in the XML used to represent the associated states. After all, with all the preliminary work done by the SIP/SIMPLE working group, I believe it would not have difficult to come up with a slightly better and more extensible XML representation, using a subset of Atom for example. Another effect of the NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome, perhaps? Anyhow, it took a year and a half to get to these PEP extended presence states written, a few days to get them through the JSF council after a rather light discussion period. It will probably take another year or so to get them rationalized when the number of wild associated namespaces would have grown to an uncontrolled level. But, as Hugh's Claymore sharp pen nicely illustrates: who cares?

Technorati Tags: XMPP, Jabber, Presence, Antecipate