As for the protocol Jabber, it is used in many messaging products on the Web - from Twitter to Google Talk to Meebo, and more. It's also used to make AOL's AIM, Yahoo Messenger, and Microsoft Windows Live Messenger interoperable. To explain more about what Jabber the protocol is, here is an extended excerpt from a post Marshall wrote in January:

Jabber Explained In Simpler Terms

In simple terms and to the best of my understanding, the http protocol used by web pages is said to be inefficient because it requires a user's machine to poll a server periodically to see if any new information is available.

Quite often there is nothing new and energy has been wasted. Think of how often Gmail checks to see if you've got any new emails (every two minutes) or how many times your RSS reader pings all of your feeds to see if they contain any new items. Meanwhile, the time between polling leads to a delay in updates.

That might seem like a small burden to you, but multiply that times everyone using these services and there's a lot of inefficiency. Sometimes that inefficiency can define the technical limits of what a service is able to do. On an individual level, I know I'm unable to use Google Reader because I have enough subscriptions that it times out checking every single one of them for new information. I wish it would just chill out and wait!

This is not a problem experienced in the world of Instant Messaging. While there are too many IM protocols in the world, a growing number of IM clients, including Google Talk, use the open standard Jabber, or XMPP.

XMPP lets one party signal to any XMPP server that it is available to receive any new information that's being delivered. When another party sends new content through the XMPP server, the message is passed on immediately and automatically to all recipients who are marked as available, basically.

What Could a Future Built on Jabber Look Like?

Ask yourself what a decentralized, open source infrastructure for real time communication could offer. A lot. As an RSS-head, I'd love to see XMPP let my various RSS clients do more faster and get bogged down in fewer unnecessary activities. RSS is all about speed for me but clients can only do so much so often when they have to pester someone else's server every time they want to check for new information. Those delays can be of real consequence.

The Tivo example is just one of many possibilities in the realm of machine-to-machine XMPP communication. Automated alerts are useful in all kinds of more serious use-cases and why use polling to monitor changed conditions when you can use an open source protocol that can make presence and real time communication scalable?
Counter Arguments

The primary arguments against a future powered by XMPP are two. First, so much of what's already been developed is web-centric, based on http, that the options for mashup-fodder are relatively limited for XMPP. For a service to integrate a number of new and existing communication features, making the leap to a less ubiquitous protocol might not make sense. Time will tell if things like IM, Android and software like Jive's can change the near total imbalance in marketshare between communication protocols online.

The second argument against this rosy picture of the future could be that open standards-based technology falls outside the profit model of many larger companies. If one vendor can corner their respective model with proprietary technology and charge a monopolist's premium for superior service, then a standards based competitor will have their work cut out for them. Google Talk's use of XMPP may have been the straw that broke the camel's back in IM because the chat client rode the coat-tails of so many other Google services.

It's hard to know what role these obstacles will play in the future, but it is exciting to think about the possibilities that a standards based approach like XMPP offers for real time communication. No one will want to wait for a web page to load if a significant portion of the internet starts working as free of friction as IM does today. Enable that communication to go on over a decentralized system based on open standards and you're talking about a whole new world.

See discussion around this on the post Could Instant Messaging (XMPP) Power the Future of Online Communication?.

It's standards based, it will bring real-time "presence" to social networks unable to invest the resources to build out the feature for themselves and it sounds like a very good idea. None the less, we do have some concerns about how much social graph, user activity and advertising data Meebo is about to get its hands on.

Prelaunch partners in the initiative to date include PopSugar, Tagged, Pixo, Addicting Games, The Insider (CBS), DanceJam, Flixter, MyYearbook and SparkArt. Readers may not have heard of many of these services (unless you've been spammed by Tagged) but several of the sites do have significant user numbers.

Meebo hopes that by announcing the service now they will amass more partners before launch in Fall. The company says that though social networks have an unusually high average "time on site" between 20 and 30 minutes - Meebo numbers are dramatically higher. Chat sessions tend to stay open for between 2 and 3 hours each, the company says. Meebo says its 1 year old "Rooms" feature, group chat sessions with media sharing and embeddable in HTML web pages, now see an aggregate 28 million unique users each month. That's an insanely high number that could grow substantially when 1 to 1 communication is rolled out across partner social networks.

Partner networks will be able to choose whether to allow their users to chat with contacts on other IM networks from inside their sites. In other words, you may be able to hang out at Flixter and talk movies with friends from your AIM contact list who aren't on the site at the moment. We hope that the networks will choose to enable this much open communication and Meebo says that at least a few have already said that they will.

Who's not in? The stuffed shirts at LinkedIn won't be able to ping eachother instantly with business questions, they aren't taking part in the campaign so far. Neither is Ning, home of enough niche social networks to choke an army of horses. We'd like to see Ning go Meebo, but they are one of the few Web 2.0 startups on the market that's raised more money than Meebo already. Ning has raised $60 million, Meebo $30 million plus (VentureBeat).

There's More Money on the Table

These partner networks will share in the revenue served up by Meebo inside the chat window.

Meebo had a "come to Jesus" moment in April when it made a new hire and announced that it would be moving towards offering uniquely useful, crowd-pleasing advertising. We don't know how sophisticated this new advertising is really proving to be, but we stand behind our statement in April that cynics questioning the company's gargantuan valuation of $200m+ are wrong. Meebo is rocking the market and this new campaign is only going to make that more true.

Show us an infrastructure play that's based on open standards (Jabber/XMPP in this case) and we'll show you an innovation that we're excited about. IM is truly one of the most engaging features of the web and we expect that the users of many niche social networks will be excited about this partnership campaign.

What About User Data?

The one question we have about this otherwise fantastic sounding idea is this: is Meebo going to get its hands on too much user data? By powering IM across a list of social networks and being the choice for chat on AIM, Yahoo Messenger, etc. for millions of people - Meebo is going to have a great picture of who is friends with whom and exactly where.

The company told us that the open standard XMPP/Jabber makes this less frightening than it might be, but we're not so sure. Meebo will likely have a great deal of knowledge about all our "social graphs" as well as the user and advertiser activity on all the sites it partners with. Will users rise up and demand data portability? Will second tier social nets guard their traffic and ad data? Don't bet on it. We hope that the developer community will at least call loudly for Meebo to open up user data to it, so that innovation can spring from the company's huge store of information.

In the mean time, here comes a really great chat experience in a whole lot of new places.