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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.

9 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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    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

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  2. 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!

  3. 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.

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  4. 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.

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  5. 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).

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  6. 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.

  7. 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.

  8. 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.