Let us kill Twitter with Jabber – we have the tools to do it !
As some of you may know, I have no fondness whatsoever for proprietary platforms. The mere thought of joining a proprietary instant messaging network sends shivers down my spine : to me the freedom of a decentralized infrastructure is essential and that is why I am a Jabber user. So by now you surely already know what my opinion of Twitter is.
As B. Mann mentions in “Twitter is Jabbber”, XMPP provides Jabber with all the message routing functionnality needed. He adds that “it has a publish and subscribe architecture built in, rather than all these crazy desktop apps that constantly poll the Twitter mothership“.
On top of that, XMPP Extensions enable plenty of functionality to match and surpass Twitter‘s. For example, XEP-0108 “User Activity” defines “an extension mechanism for capturing “extended presence” data about user activities, above and beyond availability“. An XML snippet is worth a thousand words :
<activity xmlns=’http://jabber.org/protocol/activity’>
<relaxing>
<partying/>
</relaxing>
<text xml:lang=’en’>My daughter’s birthday!</text>
</activity>
So let us see what makes Twitter so successful.
First we have mobility. Again B. Mann explains that “my only explanation for the Twitter craze is that North Americans are still enamored of anything that can do the tiniest bit of mobile integration. Yes, Twitter has managed to scale and spend many thousands of dollars paying for SMS gateways“. Sure there are Jabber SMS transports and they are usable from a phone, but you can’t beat free.
But I believe the reason for Twitter‘s success is web integration. Sure, Jabber notifications are provided by many collaborative tools, and there are ressources to make your own such as class.jabber.php, a Jabber library for PHP that I used to build Jabber presence indicator in a web page. But indeed they do not match the level of functionnality that Twitter provides out of the box. We need more web based Jabber clients – that is an interesting area that I’m quite tempted to delve into.
So the proprietary hydra has sprouted one more head, but our swords are far from dull and the jihad shall be eternal !
8 responses to “Let us kill Twitter with Jabber – we have the tools to do it !”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
See….
First of all, that Twitter pro action was a “Do you like us? support us!” thing I believe. They were pretty sure you could do this without them of course!
Second: Twitter is jabber; you’re right. And they’re helping us to create the PEP (Personal Eventing via PubSub) protocol of Jabber, which you just mentioned. And Jaiku is working on this solution too! They realized a business need, made a company of it, and then they’re trying to do this standardized, distributed….
So I don’t think it’s time for aggressivity :) Both Twitter and Jaiku was present on the latest XMPP DevCon, and the Jabber community is trying to do the best for a “distributed twitter”, or anything else you want to call it. The only thing that we need to refine PEP a bit, and it takes time to servers to implement it…
(Both OpenFire and ejabberd folks are busy to do this in time).
If you don’t believe that twitter is *besides* jabber and not against it, read the comment of Blaine Cook (senior developer @ twitter) on B. Mann’s page:
http://bmannconsulting.com/blog/bmann/twitter-is-jabber-part-ii
Don’t get me wrong, the aggressivity is half sarcastic – I don’t mean harm to anyone. But I am quite tired of seing the community fragmented by closed systems so I am indeed being a bit touchy on that subject.
Thank you for pointing out Blaine Cook’s comment – I had missed that important one. It is very interesting too learn that his position is both lucid and open. In fact his comment defuses my whole conclusion : not only does he explain that the technical foundation of Twitter is quite compatible with an open federation, but the staff is actually already in touch with third parties to work on that possibility. I am very pleased to learn that and I look forward for more news from Blaine.
And his Jabber::Simple xmpp4r-simple looks very nice !
very interesting thoughts and conversation! nice blend of humor and half sacrasim! :)
btw, enemies and friends are much like junk and treasures these days. One man’s junk is another man’s treasure!
I want a Twitter that lives behind a firewall or on the web but behind a password and in PHP but without the need for IM client connectivity or mobile. I think something like a modified phpbb or bbpress would do it. Strip out all of the unnecessary parts and re-arrange the views and you have it. This could replace ephemerally-needed e-mails. This is the problem with bb systems today. They have a lower adoption rate becuase they are not as accessible as e-mail. Increase the accessibility (get rid of multi topics, messages buried under topics, the perceived need for threading) of bb systems with something Twitter-like, eliminate inbox overflow, and you have a new productivity tool.
[…] » Let us kill Twitter with Jabber – we have the tools to do it ! (tags: twitter hacking) […]
Take a look at ISS (Instant Syndicating Standards). ISS is a set of open standards that enable people to discover and syndicate information within their social network. It blends the Web and XMPP in an elegant way.
Here is is! Turn a WordPress install into a private, self-hosted twitter with a simple customized theme called Prologue.
http://wordpress.com/blog/2008/01/28/introducing-prologue/
My favorite megaupload search engine is megauploadfiles.com it’s the most powerful an easy to use. megauploadfiles.com has incredible speed of searching rapidshare links in the internet.
megaupload search