Nothing to see here since 1987...

re:Something about federated social networks

I was just reading this article and decided to comment on the author note that XMPP was “near-standardised”. That comment turned into an article …

XMPP is  already standardised, by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) in 2004.  It really is the ONLY protocol anyone should be using for instant messaging and group chat.

We and others have built ‘microblogging’ or ‘social’ servers on top of XMPP as well, Google Wave used XMPP and there is a variant of Diaspora that uses XMPP (Diaspora*X I believe).

We saw’ land grabs’ earl on in the internets life with AOL and Compuserve, companies trying to ‘own’ a slice of the net for profit, then along came federated email (SMTP and POP) and later the web (HTTP and HTML).

Around the same time we had the ‘messengers’ AOL, Yahoo! and Microsoft but all these are rapidly loosing ground to XMPP messaging, GTalk, Facebook(yes!) and others. All the proprietary messaging formats have had or do have XMPP gateways.

What we are seeing now is a second wave of silos, Facebook and Twitter et al which are also trying to lock in users for profit, and the corresponding push back by projects like Diaspora, OneSocialWeb(killed by Vodafone) and Singly.

Singly is interesting because the underlying protocol is Telehash, which was designed by Jeremie Miller the same guy that designed XMPP, or Jabber as it was called back in 1999.  Also because it sits on JSON and UDP, JSON is well understood by web developers and UDP is well, easy. maybe this will be the new SMTP, HTTP or XMPP. 

I think the reason we see new proprietary stuff popping up regularly is because everyone is now a web developer (I mean every developer is web developer) and they like to invent things, rather that think to look at the internets existing available standardised protocols and formats and use one of them for their project. 

The raft of messaging apps using various types of HTTP transported data rather than using XMPP. This is also driven by greed, invent something, patent it, get ‘funding’, inflate the user numbers and sell out at great profit before the project runs out of cash. (this process was probably invented by the evil third world sucking monster that invented the stock exchange). 

When was the last time we saw someone inventing a new sort of email, a long time ago because everyone finally realised that email has been invented and standardised. This has almost happened with XMPP of instant messaging but will be a long while yet before it happens for the ‘social’ web.

So to sum up, new online technology is usually born out of a need for something, so someone invents a way of doing it, once a critical mass of people start to use it the standards bodies take note and try to formalise the technical side so that other parties can play as well.

There are two  problems with this, the first is that the inventor may patent the idea/tech and hold on to it for financial gain, the second is that developers are fundamentally lazy and would rather invent something from scratch because it’s easier to understand and delivers a solution (product) faster a than having to read tombs of formal standards docs. 

We will get a federated social web but not because the standards bodies, developers at large orgs or well funded startups build it but because one day most of the people looking for a social hub (Facebook, Diaspora or whatever) realise that it’s handy being able to share stuff with people no matter what network they are on.

It’ll just happen, as email did and IM almost has.

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Links.

XMPP (eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol)

Active Distributed Social Networks

Telehash

Singly

Zot! social communications protocol.