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 
IT Outsourcing is still an emerging field, partly because the very nature of IT; itself constantly evolving. The global nature of the economy provides constant opportunities for innovation as well as competition. There is no “standard” in IT, because technology is always developing at a rapid pace.Businesses in the 21st century do not have the luxury of sitting back and waiting to see what others will do; they must remain technologically competitive. Simultaneously, businesses must concentrate on their core product or service and minimize the cost of maintaining and updating their infrastructure.
Hi Steve, When I talk about standards I mean the standardised technologies that are essential to modern IT, the standards that define email(SMTP, IMAP etc), web(HTTP, HTML etc) and IM(XMPP) and other base level technologies that enable tech firms to build the sort of end user products you are talking about.