Those of us in the XMPP community have touted the benefits of our protocol for microblogging for some time. Even before Identi.ca and Laconica , Peter Saint-Andre and Joe Hildebrand drafted a basic microblogging XEP . Microblogging looks a lot like an impromptu Multi-User Chat and it is clearly a Publish-Subscribe based service. With XMPP you get federation for free; there is no need for a specification on how microblogging sites communicate with each other. So why hasn’t XMPP made inroads in this space? I’m unsure why so many microblogging attempts have ignored XMPP thus far. Perhaps in everyone’s rush to copy or fix Twitter , no one bothered to research alternative architectures. I imagine many developers are reluctant to step outside their comfort zone of pre-made libraries for their favorite Web development stack. After many incompatible implementations of microblogging, the only place we see XMPP is in naive bots that can publish and deliver updates in real time using a standard XMPP client. Basic Benefits Of XMPP Stefan enumerated some of the benefits that microblogging built on XMPP would have: real time communication, elimination of polling, scalability, and federation. I’ve written about the importance of real time for microblogging before . I don’t think anyone anticipated that the XMPP interface to Twitter would be so popular as to run into scaling problems. The fact that many Twitter users are using custom clients that try ...
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