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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.

20 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.

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    Don't read this!
    1. Re:Finally some good news by rusty0101 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Not exactly sure how this helps wireless, this is IM stuff. Wireless is a part of IM, however I would hesitate to claim that it is specifically significant to wireless.

      What this is really directed at is getting IM clients to be able to interoperate. Initially this was going to be done in the protocol that AOL was drawing up, however they dropped development on that and have been somewhat antagonistic towards interoperating with other IM providers.

      From a business perspective having half a dozen IM clients (yahoo, aol, icq, msn, jabber, etc.) on different desktops, that don't interoperate is a bit of a pain to support. Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL would very much prefer that businesses would standardize on their own service, however if you have to work with outside vendors you have no gaurantee, that that vendor will use the same service, or that you will be able to interoperate with it.

      You might be able to set up your own gateway using jabber, or a couple of other servers, however one of the ways that AOL uses to "protect their users" is to only allow so many users at a time connect from the same IP address. If more than that connect, they block the IP address. That might be OK if you are a mom and pop operation with only four or five people useing your connection, but fails rappidly when you look at it from the perspective of a large bank or multinational corporation.

      From what I understand, this working group is attempting to lay out the protocols necessary to allow gateways between IM services to exist. Theory being that you could use your Yahoo IM client to talk to your cousin using an AIM client, who is talking to his buddy over in the MSN world. Asside from the same level of requirement to know what service the remote user is on.

      At the moment, with variations on the theme such as jabber, you have to have an account on the remote system even if you are only establishing a connection to a jabber server.

      Then again, I could be wrong. Perhaps this will only help wireless users.

      -Rusty

      --
      You never know...
  2. Open standards are a good thing... by Camulus · · Score: 3, Insightful

    However, there is no guarantee that they will be implemented properly. For instance, Microsoft has had a long history of perverting open standards/languages (i.e. creating MSSMB instead of using the current standard and bastardizing Java). So, yes, this is a good thing, but some how, I don't see a lot of the established messaging services changing their ways. I hope I am wrong though.

  3. 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.

    1. Re:Admirable, but ... by Auckerman · · Score: 5, Interesting
      "Why should AOL or Microsoft get on board to be inter-operable?"


      Because it's inevidable. I remember a time when companies were building proprietary networks systems for corporate use. I remember when AOL wouldn't let people send/receive e-mail from internet. What forced them to change was University use. Researchers don't care about ease of use. They see computers like a hammer, just a tool. They set up e-mail systems and web servers. I remeber compiling Linux onto a 383 long before many of you even knew what e-mail was. Instant Messaging is next.


      My boss want to do IM, to keep in more direct touch with associates. He doesn't understand why noone sets up their own servers. So we set up our own right next to our e-mail system (so that e-mail and jabber ids are the same). This is one of the first of MANY coming jabber servers. After a point, every incoming freshman is going to not only get e-mail/web hosting but also a jabber id.

      --

      Burn Hollywood Burn
    2. Re:Admirable, but ... by rusty0101 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Considering that the real start to this was Microsoft's attempt to interoperate with AOL, using the open standards AOL published (and later stoped useing) to allow independent client developers to talk to AIM servers, I think there is a desire at some of the IM server platforms to interoperate.

      Obviously there are problems that will still need to be adressed, however that is what the working group is attempting to address.

      As far as I am concerned, knowing that one of my buddies is online, and being able to send an IM to them, regardless of the service or client either of us are using would be a major step forward.

      -Rusty

      --
      You never know...
  4. AOL TW by CySurflex · · Score: 5, Funny
    AOL Time Warner is suing the IETF. From the lawsuit:

    As you can see in Patent#93993229, we invented the idea of instant message interopability. You don't believe us? Look at our next version of AIM and ICQ, they're combined! combined I tell you!

  5. Great! by t8k_it_ez · · Score: 3, Funny

    Now I should only have to uninstall a single IM client when I service the computers for my workplace!

  6. So let me get this straight... by Prince_Ali · · Score: 5, Funny

    If these standards are implemented will it mean that people on many different chat clients will be able to make false assertions about my sexual preferences no matter which client I am using? I can't wait.

    --
    Slashdotter are stupid and biased.
  7. what XMPP really is by ageitgey · · Score: 5, Informative

    The headline is a little misleading. This isn't a working group to create some new standard for interoperability. This is a working group to evaluate and possibly improve Jabber's protocol.

    In other words, this new group will ensure that Jabber's existing protocol is secure and has good support for localization. But it has nothing to do with AIM/ICQ, Yahoo Messanger, or anything like that. You can use XMPP today - it's called Jabber (and it's pretty cool).

    --
    Uninnovate - Only the finest in engineering.
  8. I fell for the /. hype.... by brassman · · Score: 4, Informative
    Actually installed a Jabber server yesterday. Should have dug a little deeper though; I got it from jabber.com instead of jabber.org, so it's going to expire in a month or so. (Duh.) Well, guess I've got some time to straighten that out.

    What really makes me shake my head, though, is the client they provided. It's locked on the jabber.com server. What's up with that? They sell you a server, and then give you a client that you can only use with a server they didn't sell you?!

    --
    "Ain't no right way to do a wrong thing."
    1. Re:I fell for the /. hype.... by rusty0101 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      There are a couple dozen free and comercial jabber clients available. You are not restricted in which client you use. Clients exist that run on any platform that supports perl, or java. Other clients exist that will only run on a Gnome or KDE desktop. Or only Windows.

      Take a look at the list of clients available under the client list at jabber.org or even some of the links under that.

      Don't sell the comercial server short either. The evaluation copy may expire in a month, however it does support some features that are not in the open/free version of the server.

      -Rusty

      --
      You never know...
  9. 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

  10. Re:I fear for the weak willed by Rupert · · Score: 3, Funny

    but some ... readers will eventually be in a real relationshop

    i.e. a relationship that you pay for.

    Sounds about right to me.

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    E_NOSIG
  11. Not enough by Lord+Prox · · Score: 3, Insightful

    First off that the IETF supporting a working group for XMPP/Jabber kicks ass. But it will not give us what it promises. In no fault of its own... I am sure it will do what it is designed for from a tech POV. Business (read: AOL MSN Yahoo, etc) don't want it. They more than don't want it, they are probably keeping an eye on it out of concern. AOL is the best example of this. They get people to sign up because their friends signed up and they can chat (and according to the ads you can even send pictures in email! WOW!) They don't want you to be able to use just any ISP. Or just any anything. They will not use XMPP/Jabber. They will intentionally not work with XMPP/Jabber. AOL excels at not cooperating in the IM client area. They want it to bee this way, not because they could not from a protocol/technology point of view

    In the end XMPP/Jabber will only work with itself. A marvel of interoperability.

    And this suits me just fine. They can keep their IM-BS. The rest of us can use somthing else.

  12. More old news by jc42 · · Score: 4, Funny

    So what's new here? Back in the early 80's, I used the talk(1) command a lot, and it worked between all the systems that were then capable of using the Internet.

    Of course, those systems were limited to a hundred or so unix clones, plus VMS. But it would have worked just find on Windoze and the Mac, too, if they had bothered to pay attention to what was already developed and available for free.

    It's really just another case of the commercial world laboriously reinventing the wheel, and loudly proclaiming that their shape wheel (square, hexagonal, etc.) are the best, while carefully ignoring the long existence of a round wheel.

    (1) See any unix manual from the early 80's.

    --
    Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
  13. Like the early days of email by Earlybird · · Score: 5, Interesting
    It's useful to compare the current IM situation to the early days of email, when different mail systems would not talk nicely with each other.

    Today there are a bunch of competing networks -- AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo! and, to a lesser extent, Groove -- none of which interoperate at the protocol level. There is no infrastructure counterpart to SMTP, RFC-822, MIME etc.

    XMPP, aka Jabber, is the IM counterpart to SMTP, conceptually -- it's a unified protocol that IM software needs to standardize on -- as well as technologically: it's an asynchronous, routed, queuing messaging protocol. XMPP leverages RFC-822 for addressing, MIME and HTML for content, and further refines the SMTP idea by adding an extensible syntax (XML with namespaces), presence, persistent connections, deferral metadata, named services, group chat, file transfer etc.

    To say that XMPP exists for interoperability is like saying HTTP exists for interoperability. XMPP isn't really the glue that could tie proprietary IM networks together, although it certainly does that, too.

    Not incidentally, to get started with Jabber, pick up the best Jabber client for Linux/Windows/MacOS X and register with one of the free public Jabber servers. The account setup takes about 10 seconds and is done through the program.

  14. 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.

  15. Just another IETF standard for IM... by jamezilla · · Score: 5, Informative
    FYI, this is only the latest offering in the arena of IM standards. There are 4 other IETF working groups related to IM standards:

    Instant Messaging and Presence Protocol (IMPP)
    SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions (SIMPLE)
    Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)
    Common Presence and Instant Messaging (CPIM) (Still a draft)

    In addition to these guys, Wireless Village is an IM standard created by Ericsson, Motorola, and Nokia. It's getting very strong traction among wireless carriers who want to deploy IM on phones and other mobile devices. Of these different offerings, SIP isn't strictly an IM thing, but there are people trying to use it to set up IM sessions. Microsoft uses SIP in their Messenger offering (which is how they claim they are "standards-based").

    CPIM is probably dead.

    IMPP has some traction in the 3GPP wireless groups, but not really anywhere else (read "probably dead").

    SIMPLE has tons of backers including IBM (Lotus) and is probably going to emerge as one of the dominant standards.

    Jabber is just trying to stay afloat in all this standards chaos. This was a very good move for them since they actually have millions of deployed users. Jabber is the only IETF-related working group that can claim real-world deployment like this. None of the other standards have any subtantial deployed user base (if any users at all).

    Probably what will happen is that as IM servers emerge, they will support a handful of these protocols, just like email servers currently support IMAP, POP, etc.

    Notice that AOL, ICQ, MSN and Yahoo! are not pushing their protocols as standards anymore. They are plying the Mexican stand-off thing and probably will have to scramble to jump on one of these standards as things shake out.

  16. Interoperability. by Grendel+Drago · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Wouldn't it be conceptually easy to map an AIM name, say, HotSw33tie, to the ID HotSw33tie@aol.com, and the MSN Messenger name GatezRox to GatezRox@msn.com and so on? Since AOL and MSN both use a big centralized server, wouldn't this just require a simple extension of AOL's servers to interact with the full Jabber-style IM world? They could still retain compatibility for people using older AIM clients, anyway, but those people wouldn't be able to talk to MSN/ICQ/Jabber folks.

    And does this whole setup mean that I can run my own IM host? As in, I can be BadAssBob@bobshost.com? No external service necessary? I can IM WimpAssFred@wimpybox.com just like that, no centralized server necessary? Just like email?

    Oh... oh my pants!

    --grendel drago

    --
    Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca