I'll keep publishing

I was flicking through an older Slideshare presentation called ‘Microblogging via XMPP‘ (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) and it occurred to me that whilst there’s no doubt Twitter has redefined public internet messaging it’s not speeded up one to one or one to many communication, in fact it’s slowed it down.

Take the points from slide 6:

London – Calcutta, message + reply (Peter Saint-Andre)

• 1800: 2 years (ship)
• 1914: 1 month (steamship)
• 1950: 1 week (airmail)
• 1980: 2 days (overnight mail)
• 1994: 10 min (email)
• 1999: 1 sec (IM)

It suddenly struck me that because Tweets are sent and received via HTTP polling the delivery time is more than a 1999 IM.

So a quick test between 2 Twitter accounts using Tweetie and Seesmic to DM saw 2 mins 55 secs for the send and 2 mins 29 secs for the reply. That’s 5 mins 24 secs for a simple “Hi” and “Hello” back. Interestingly I got the email notification of a DM before either Twitter app picked up the DM.

So our new bullet point would be;

• 2009: 5 min  (micro-blogging)

It’s entirely legit to say that services like Twitter are a whole new category and aren’t supposed to be real time, but how many users of such services expect them to be? I know a few people that think Twitter is close to IM, when in fact trying to have a one to one conversation over twitter isn’t really possible in the same that it is over instant messaging.

So it’s with this in mind that many people, including Twitter during mid 2008, looked at XMPP to help deliver a more real time experience for micro-bloggers. In fact the ‘Microblogging Over XMPP’ specification was updated mid 2008 and describes a way to deploy close to real time micro-blogging.

Some alternatives to Twitter use XMPP (Twitter dropped ‘official’ support mid 2008) gateways, services like Jaiku, identi.ca (status.net) and FriendFeed. XMPP has also been picked up by Google for GTalk and Google Wave, Wordpress and Yahoo! for various projects.

Many people, myself included, use an XMPP chat program to ‘tweet’ via these gateways so that we can microblog and IM from the same application. (In fact Cleartext will soon be releasing such an app).

So Twitter will probably do just fine with long gaps between messages and HTTP polling but my intuition tells me that in an age when everyone wants more and faster ,that an XMPP based real time federated micro-blogging service may just catch on and even replace IM.

I’d like to see that bullet point read;

• 2010: 0.5 sec (real time micro-blogging)

David Banes.

Footnote: There’s also an open microblogging standard called, Open Microblogging, but this is HTTP