Well, TechCruch reporting that Twitter are finally talking about their firehose, that stream of tweets that was XMPP is now HTTP…
“The firehose is a stream HTTP solution; a client connects to it and the stream begins, ceasing only when the client disconnects. ”
As an proponent of XMPP for near real time messaging I must say that using a technology designed to pull data for this is slightly baffling. But then most developers know HTTP so I suppose it makes sense, but then again if the ‘firehose’ is only available to select few then it makes no difference.
I can’t help but think they took a wrong turn with XMPP by trying to get OpenFire to do the job, when they had been working with ejabberd, which is a much better base platform. Was OpenFire the cause of Alex Payne’s comments about Java libraries not handling the load? Did they talk to someone like ProcessOne about ejabberd’s clustering?
I suppose the best thing to do from here on in is to support the projects that support XMPP, the obvious ones being identi.ca and other Laconi.ca based mirco-blogging services like TWiT Army.