I'll keep publishing

I’m obviously biased, I’m an XMPP fan, but I can’t help but think that Mozilla’s Raindrop project, in the context of the real time web, is missing the point.

It’s going to be a similar argument that swirled around Twitter in the middle of ‘08. The big question asked then was why did Twitter drop a pubsub push messaging model for tweeting (XMPP) in favour of a polling (HTTP pull or fetch) model?

Surely in the real time web we need  a real time protocol, or close to it. Something like XMPP. We’ve all noticed that Tweets often have more latency than email, that’s because we’re all polling twitter and fetching updates, believe or not email is a push model (SMTP + IMAP/IDLE), that’s why it’s faster!

So I was disappointed to read;

Raindrop uses a mini web server to fetch your conversations from different sources

I was half hoping that these guys had produced a ’stripped down’ simpler to implement XMPP type protocol. Alas no, we’re still playing ‘fetch’.

Even something like Pubsubhubub is moving in a reasonable direction. We really do need ‘always’ on connections if  the real time web is going to materialise any time soon.

I suspect the Mozilla guys are really trying to give us an ‘open’ version of Google Wave, which is a nice goal to aim for anyway. At least the guys at Google reaslise we need real time server-server federation and used XMPP for that part of Wave.

I’m afraid Raindrop looks like ‘just another’ attempt to merge multiple message types in a single innovative GUI, there are many projects that have attempted this, ours included