I'll keep publishing

Looking at my Google Alerts this morning I saw this one;

So after quick read at of this article on ReadWriteWeb I posted the following as a comment.I’ll declare a vested interest in XMPP first, our service Cleartext ESM (Enterprise Social Messaging) uses XMPP.

Now I’ll also say that it’s worth noting that XMPP does enterprise and internet scale and is good at bridging these through an ecosystem of components, I think this is a key benefit.

There’s a third issue with Twitter in addition to business model and latency at large scale (which I don’t believe you can solve with http polling) and that is shifting technology road map.

For anyone to build complicated enterprise and internet level apps on Twitter this needs to be solved and as the platform is evolving rapidly that’s a big ask.

For example parts of our platform rely on the fact that re-tweets and hash tags are in the message. Twitters recent news that RT’s will become part of the API is good news for short messages but bad news for solutions proxying Twitter if only because we all have to do more R&D, which equates to delays to market and increased costs.

I’m firmly believe that email succeeded because its an open, standards based, federated platform. XMPP delivers the same for IM and mirco-blogging. I think this is the real time bus you’re looking for.

I was just reading this, which is all about formalising re-tweets via Twitters API;
re: http://mashable.com/2009/08/13/details-project-retweet/

It struck me that this could break services like Cleartext ESM where we are proxying Twitter for generic XMPP desktop and mobile clients. We don’t use the API at the end point, but at the ‘cloud based’ XMPP<>Twitter gateway, this means any XMPP/Jabber client can access the full set of message driven commands like RT and # tags (are has tags next to get plugged into the API?).

Various other companies, like Process-One, have Twitter gateways for XMPP servers and run XMPP<>Twitter services like Tweet.im. We do this so that people can use Jabber/XMPP desktop and mobile clients to IM and  tweet rather than have an multiple IM and micro-blogging apps.

It makes sense for our corporate clients as well because they can deploy a standard single end point for all their IM/micro-blogging needs, for example, MSN, AIM, GTalk, identi.ca and Jaiku as well, not just Twitter.

Have the guys at Twitter considered this? Or is this second time in two years that changes at Twitter will bounce XMPP users?

Is it that Twitter prefers direct contact with the end points via their API, maybe to route advertising to generate that elusive revenue stream, and if so what does that mean for the myriad of online web services that also proxy Twitter like CoTweet and Seesmic, or are these classed as apps?

I for one would like to get  abetter understanding so that Cleartext doesn’t head down a blind ally with our own products and services, although I can already see that maybe all we need is a customised XMPP end point and some mods to the hosted Twitter gateway.

But then that means we’re no longer supporting standard XMPP apps. Of course we could discover the RT in a tweet and convert it to an API call at the gateway.

I suppose what we really need is a federated Twitter clone that a) uses XMPP and b) leap frogs Twitter in the popularity stakes, time for a laconi.ca/status.net based success story maybe? That’s a big ask.

A great insight from Michael Osterman on email uptime.

http://www.messagingwire.com/spv-26.aspx

Apple’s always had an XMPP (Jabber) solution within it’s OSX based XServe platform and supported it on the desktop with iChat so it’s nice to see that they’ve now used it in their new iPhone push notification service.

The source for this post is here;

Apple begins stress testing iPhone 3.0 push notifications
By Prince McLean

There are some cool ideas in the thread linked below, in summary mapping Jive Clearspace spaces to XMPP pub sub nodes complete with the matching access rights. Now that would be very nice.

Jivespace: XMPP Notifications ?.

Some good news about Au internet access.

The Federal Government and private sector will invest up to $43 billion over eight years in a super-fast national broadband network, in the ‘’single biggest infrastructure decision in Australia’s history”.

National broadband network gets go ahead.

You know I harp on about vendor – reseller relationships a lot because I believe if done well then resellers can materially increase the amount of business a vendor is able to close. I’m qualified to say what I think here as we are a vendor (via Cleartext’s messaging services) and a reseller (via our Cleartext Systems business). Read more…

I know it’s not nice, but when you run a business you can’t help but smile when a provider in a similar space to you has ‘issues’, especially when that provider has won business at your expense.

For the 4th time in about a year GMail has issues which always prompts me to remind everyone that our ClearEmail hosted email service has been up 100% over a similar time frame (barring scheduled maintenance).

Good to see someone encouraging Blackberry to federate their IM platform. Jason Salas has a short open letter on his blog. I’d like to support this.

“An open hypertext letter to Research in Motion
RE: Federation between BlackBerry Messenger and XMPP networks”

Especially when some of the other big networks like AIM and Yahoo! are looking at XMPP.

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.

Not a step by step but this will help to get TwitterSpy running on Debian.

Dependencies

Make sure you have these installed (in this order?)
With Python, pysqlite and Twisted you need to download then run the following in each directory after unpacking

python setup.py build
python setup.py install

- Memcached (apt-get memcached on Debian)
- Python 2.5.x (not 2.4, 2.6 or 3, remember to reboot)
- SQLite3 (you may need to remove sqlite first, [apt-get remove sqlite])
- SQLAlchemy
- pysqlite-2.4.1
- Twisted 8.2.x (remember to reboot, odd I know)
- git (to tackle the gitfm file manager name clash)
— apt-get install git-core
— update-alternatives –config git

Installation

- Unpack Twitterspy
- git submodule init && git submodule update
- copy twitterspy.conf.sample to twitterspy.conf
- edit twitterspy.conf
- sqlite twitterspy-test.sqlite3 (to create the database)
- run ./etc/create_tables.py
- Setup a startup script in /etc/init.d
- run twisted -ny twitterspy.tac &

Leave the ‘n’ out of the above if yu’re going to be logging out and want to leave twitterspy running.

It’s nice when reputable research firms call something out that’s aligned with the Cleartext road map…

See below… ‘Messaging SaaS will take off.’

and…

‘IM and presence integration with email clients will improve, and become an increasing expectation. This will, in turn, increase demand for unified IM, and XMPP-based systems will grow as a consequence’

Also… “Spam’s being beaten”, something I’ve been seeing as an inevitable outcome heading into 2010 onwards…

Click through for the full read.

Published by Packt Publishing, written by Mayank Sharma (ISBN 978-1-847195-26-5)

I’ve spent the last month or so reading this book and my summary is that it’s worth buying if you’re looking for an easy way to setup an enterprise, standards based IM (EIM) platform on your OS of choice. Openfire runs as a Java app in application servers such as Tomcat and has been around for a long enough to be stable and reliable, a good book along side it helps smooth out the learning curve.

The books title is slightly misleading in that your first impression might be that it’s about Openfire administration only. In fact it covers most of the ‘family’ of solutions around Openfire, like Spark, gateways to legacy IM (MSN, AOL etc), web chat and VoIP. There are even a sections on preparing for an EIM rollout, directory integration, multiple locations, clustering and archiving.

Each chapter is easy to understand and the chapters themselves follow a logical order with some good background information on Jabber (XMPP). Openfire’s open source community delivers most things you’ll need for an EIM solution and this book is a great way to kick off that process.

‘Apple shipped more iPhones during the quarter than all the Windows Mobile devices shipped worldwide by Microsoft’s partners, according to Canalys.’

More here…

That’s the comment from the new Microsoft boss, the other Steve (Ballmer). Which just about sums up Microsoft. When you have a monopoly you can keep trundling out the same technology with a new GUI year after year and the clones* will buy it.

What Ballmer doesn’t get is that there are still a lot of people that think technology is exciting and that innovation is as important as a sound business plan for investors. But then this is the guy that said something about the iPhone being a bad idea as well.

I understand that once the technology gets to mainstream someone needs to make some money out of it, I suppose that’s where Microsoft comes in, buy the tech, bundle it into the resellers and then you can return some ‘value’ to your investors. That model has worked well for Microsoft for years.

I suppose when you’re stuck in old tech it’s difficult to break out, Microsoft vs Google, it’s a bit like NASA vs Scaled Composites (who Virgin Galactic selected to build their space plane).

* All those people and PC manufacturers that are happy with forever iterations of Windows clones, 95, 2000, XP, Mobile, Vista, 7 etc.

The Register is reporting that IBM is working on a new platform for web based conferencing, looks like xmpp is in the mix.

Well I’ve made it onto the Board of the XMPP Standards Foundation, see our press release. This is a significant thing for me, having been pushing Jabber/XMPP since about 1999 when Cleartext ‘version one’ was developing an Enterprise IM platform called CipherIM.

That product was modelled on the SMTP architecture with a proprietory plain text protocol. I soon ralised that this was a mistake and the last version of the CipherIM client was in fact built on the Jabber protocol, later to become XMPP.

There are big things ahead for XMPP now Cisco own Jabber Inc, look at the way Cisco has pushed the IronPort brand and products into their client base. I feel sure XMPP has a good shot at becoming the protocol of choice for human and machine based communications.

I thought I’d post this, even though it’s not the sort of contect I usually post, because it was a bit tricky to get going. A few steps to getting the Axigen (32bit) mail server running. Read more…

I’ve been waiting to upgrade my MacBook after moving from a 15″ PowerBook a while back, we’re now heavily invested in Mac’s at home and at the business, and in FireWire storage. It’s already at 2Gb RAM, had a new battery and HD upgrade.

I’m also a bit of a minimalist, always gone for smaller laptops, the PowerBook being the exception that proved the rule, a bit big to lug around.

So I was gobsmacked when I discovered that the new MacBook has no FireWire! This creates a few issues for me;

• Either I go back to the larger form factor of the MacBook Pro
• Get a MacBook Air.. oh wait, no FireWire there either
• Throw away all our FireWire kit and buy USB … Doh!
• Stay with the old MacBook

Looks like the last option is my only realistic one, at least I won’t get any grief from the Financial Controller

What were you thinking Apple.

I’m convinced, but that doesn’t mean I’m right, that if Jabber/XMPP had strong gateways to other networks early on it would have got bigger sooner, here’s why. Read more…

I’ve been asked couple of times recently about Phorm, NebuAd and similar technologies, so here’re some links to get you started.

The following two transcripts of some Security Now episodes from Steve Gibson of GRC (Steve coined the phrase ’spyware’) give a good intro.

http://www.grc.com/sn/sn-151.htm
http://www.grc.com/sn/sn-153.htm

This is the vendor that’s caused the most ripples… used to be called ‘121media’, if you know anything about spyware this will cause your hair to stand on end:)
http://www.phorm.com/

More links…
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/29/phorm_roundup/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phorm
http://phormwatch.blogspot.com/

http://www.nebuad.com/

It’s good to see that one of our competitors, Messagelabs, is playing catch up with their channel program;

‘The program adds multi-year commissions to the Standard Associate program providing partners the opportunity to accrue additional revenue by up-selling and renewing current customers’

Cleartext’s program has had multi-year commissions for a while now, it’s definitely hotting up in the SaaS (Cleartext) and Managed Service Provider (MessageLabs) type of markets. They’ll be catching up with the technology soon and adding BATV!

It’s good to see ScanSafe getting this award after the falling out with MessageLabs a few years back … Well done ScanSafe.

An interesting article on the Jabber acquisition from Kurt Cagle on O’Reilly’s web site.

The IT news wires have been running hot with news of CISCO’s intent to acquire Jabber Inc. Most commentators ‘get it’ some are asking why would you bother when there’s no money in IM, obviously these people haven’t been following XMPP and it’s progress into presence and social networking.