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XMPP Gets An IETF Working Group

Posted by michael on from the im-me dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The IETF has approved the formation of a Working Group to continue evolving the XMPP protocol." Interoperable instant messaging, who'd a thunk it. Our previous story has more information.

4 of 101 comments (clear)

  1. Finally some good news by stevenbee · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'm glad that it is finally dawning on the Big Technology powers-that-be that proprietary messaging schemes are bad for everyone's business. This is definitely needed if wireless is really to be the way of the future, and since there is so much money being spent on the gadgets, it's inevitable that they are going to have to play nice and compete on some other basis besides lock-out.

    --
    Don't read this!
  2. Admirable, but ... by BShive · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I don't see any of the big players adopting it when they all want control of the space. Why should AOL or Microsoft get on board to be inter-operable? They loose the control over what the end user sees.

  3. Wishful thinking. by Montreal+Geek · · Score: 4, Insightful
    This is all this is.

    While the emergence of a standard will quickly generate open source implementations (I can easily see, say, licq supporting the standard within days of the first draft) there is no incentive for the big corporate players to support it, and indeed a great many reasons not to.

    Their interrest lies not in interoperability, but making sure that their customers can only talk to their customers so that if you want to be able to IM your brother-in-law or somesuch you have to subscribe to their service (even if it's in a way just as "simple" as feeding them your email for generating spam).

    This means that, in the long run, the mass market consumer will not be able to talk to the open source clients we geeks will be using.

    Like I said, wishful thinking. If we're really lucky this is how things will happen, and we'll have an IM that isn't swamped with hundreds of thousands of inane twinks and lusers spamming us with request for pr0n or cybersex. :-)

    -- MG

  4. back-end interoperability by g4dget · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I really don't care very much about what kind of protocol I use to talk to the IM server. What bugs me is that I need to sign up with half a dozen different services in order to have a good chance of reaching most people.

    What we really need is interoperability at the back-end--AOL IM servers need to talk to MSN IM and to IRC. Maybe standardized protocols would help with that a little (the AOL server could pretend to be a client for MSN), but I suspect lack of connectivity is more of a business thing.