XMPP
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Will Developers Use the New Digg Streaming API?
Digg just announced the availability of a new streaming real-time Application Programming Interface (API) for all submissions, Diggs and comments on the site. Modeled after the Twitter Streaming API, Digg elected to use Tornado, the real-time framework built by FriendFeed and open sourced by Facebook, and Redis to power the API.
Will developers go for it? Though Digg's currency appears to be dropping fast, real-time streaming data from millions (?) of social media users, concerning links to content from all around the Web, has got to hold some interest for programatic analysis, UI innovation and publishing industry analytics. The flow of data coming through the API seems a little anemic, though. We spoke with some of the Web's leading data developers who see today's announcement in very different ways.
Facebook Opens IM to Developers, Drops Ball on Interoperability
Facebook announced this morning that its wildly popular Instant Messaging service now supports the open IM standard XMPP/Jabber. That means that 3rd party developers will be able to build support for Facebook Chat into their websites and chat applications with ease.
Standards are great like this for making development simpler but the other promise of technical standards so far remains unrealized. Interoperability is the big promise of open standards in general and XMPP chat specifically, but at launch Facebook Chat by XMPP does not federate with other XMPP servers. So this isn't about interoperability, it's about further extending Facebook around the web.
Where Is the Real-Time Web Message Bus?
Real-time computing is not new. This is the third generation of real-time:
• First generation: was done on a single processor, usually for process control in military systems.
• Second generation: within a Local Area Network, usually for a financial trading room.
• Third generation: applied across the whole Web/Internet, what we call the real-time Web.
In each generation a stack has emerged, and secure messaging has been key to that stack. The names change and the scale of the prize and challenges certainly changes, but the basic issue remains the same: delivering messages reliably and quickly. In this post, we trace the steps from the second generation to the third generation to see how the real-time Web might play out.
Hemlock: An Open-Source Real-Time Web Platform
Hemlock, a new open-source framework for building real time web apps in Flash with an XMPP back-end has been released by MintDigital, a development shop in London and New York. Real time apps that use efficient methods of communicating information between the browser and the server are all the rage these days. Now Flash developers will have an easy way to get in the game.
Hemlock joins services like Notify.me (our review), Urban Airship (our review) and others in offering developers a way to get hip to the real-time, just like the big guys at Facebook, Twitter, etc. Some of these implementations are open source, like Hemlock, and some are not. It's clear though that the developer world is ready for some real time technology to build on.
Twitter Track is Back Thanks to New Service from Particls
Particls, the one-time RSS feed organizer and alerting service, has today launched a new project they're calling "Particls Fountain." Although it's hinted that the service will eventually do much more, today its goal is simple. Particls Fountain will function as a replacement for the long-gone Twitter Track feature that once allowed you to follow topics of interest by keyword.
Notifixious' Superfeeder: Getting Closer to the Real-Time Web
RSS feeds have become the backbone of the Web 2.0 movement, but as we are moving towards a real-time experience on the web, RSS is starting to show its age. To update your subscriptions, you have to regularly poll these feeds. This, of course, is a major problem for RSS readers and notification services which often have to deal with a substantial lag before new posts and messages appear. The newest service that tries to tackle this problem is Notifixious, but as Notifixious founder Julien Genestoux explains, a lot of problems still need to be fixed before ubiquitous real-time notifications can become a reality.
Security and Privacy on Social Networks and the Semantic Web
While the MD5 hack that puts e-commerce sites at risk by faking security certificates received most of the attention at the 25C3 conference in Berlin today, another interesting talk about using XMPP to ensure privacy and security on social networks by Jan Torben Heuer caught our eyes as well. Heuer demoed a social bookmarking service named Diki, which implements some of his ideas, though in the long run, the developers are planning to take this prototype and develop a full-blown social network with a focus on privacy and encryption around this.
Gnip Says XMPP Ecosytem Too Half-Baked, Pulls the Plug
There's no more riding through the transit station on roller blades - the rental shops aren't keeping them in good enough repair. That could be an analogy for a decision announced today by Gnip, a startup aiming to become the ultimate ping server for social media.
XMPP/Jabber, the Open Source real-time communication protocol popularized by Instant Messaging that many have hoped would serve as foundation for a real-time web of the future, has become too much trouble to support and will no longer be a supported protocol at Gnip. More than just one protocol, it's a story of long tail developer communities and the ambitious startups forced to make resource decisions.
Cisco Acquires Jabber (The Company, Not The Standard)
Cisco announced today the acquisition of Jabber, Inc., a provider of presence and messaging software. It's important to note that Cisco has acquired the company called Jabber (jabber.com), not the open standard Jabber (jabber.org) which we have written about extensively in the past. The Jabber protocol, now called XMPP, is an open standard for Instant Messaging. The Jabber company builds products on, and provides support for, the protocol. In many ways Jabber.com is similar to what Red Hat is in the Linux community. See Marshall Kirkpatrick's description of Jabber the standard below.
Meebo to Inject Jabber IM Into Social Networks Everywhere
Web instant messaging platform Meebo is announcing tonight that the company is working on a huge plan to power instant messaging on second tier social networks all around the web. While MySpace and Facebook have their own IM already, nine other social networks with respectable traffic are scheduled to add Meebo IM to their services this fall.
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.
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