Well after years using multi-protocol chat programs like Adium to access my Hotmail, Yahoo!, .Mac and Jabber accounts I’ve made the switch to a ‘pure’ XMPP (Jabber) chat client. At the moment that’s Psi as it’s multi-platform running on Mac, Windows and Linux. I’ll be recommending it to clients when they sign up to our new hosted XMPP service ClearIM.
So you’re wondering if I’ve ditched my buddies on networks like MSN and Yahoo!, well no I haven’t. That’s because I’m using the Cleartext ClearIM service public IM gateways to connect to the ‘legacy’ networks that the big brands are still running. This means all my chat, whatever network it’s coming from or going to, is being routed via ClearIM, it’s being archived as well, online, isn’t that neat 
With multi-protocol desktop clients you don’t get the benefit of single ‘pipe’ for IM that can add processes like archiving or content filtering, you’re tied to a desktop solution. This also means that I can run XMPP software like ProcessOne’s OneTeam on my iPhone, no need for a multi-protocol app or multiple apps to handle all my buddies when I’m mobile.
If you’re interested in how all this works or how you can get a similar setup contact me via the Cleartext web site or leave a comment here.
News this week that Google App Engine plans support for XMPP this year.
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.
Having just written an article on XMPP and IM federation, which I must admit is rather focused on my own views, but then that’s better than cutting and pasting from someone else I suppose, I thought I’d do a bit of development.
So pulling out the latest development environment and a copy of /n softwares brilliant IP*Works product I had an XMPP IM client running in no time. So what else? I headed over to AOL as I recalled something about OpenAIM, and a developers kit for their AIM network. Thinking it would be fun to write an application that did XMPP and AIM.
Well, that was short lived. I found the section on ‘AIM Custom Clients’ and though I’d better check out the restrictions, expecting to have to carry advertisements or a large AIM logo, to be shocked to find this;
‘… developers are not permitted to build AIM Custom Clients that are multi-headed interoperable with any other IM network.’ Read more…
An interesting article on the Jabber acquisition from Kurt Cagle on O’Reilly’s web site.
Huge news in the IM space today with Cisco announcing it’s acquisition of Jabber Inc the main vendor of XMPP IM and presence technology. Cisco now have and email and EIM platform, with IronPort they have email security so I suppose the next stop is FaceTime. Read more…
I’ve been prompted into putting my hand up for a position on the board of the XMPP Foundation. Sounds like a good gig
We’re please to announce that we’ve become a sponsor of the XMPP Standards Foundation .
XMPP has been around since 1999 and was/is commonly called Jabber Instant messaging, but it’s much more than that now as social networks take off and architects are looking for a protocol to glue these systems together. XMPP has s shot at taking that space. We’ve been ‘lurking’ on the edges of IM/XMPP since 1999-2000 with our own EIM product called CipherIM which was unfortunately discontinued in 2003.
Keep checking at www.cleartext.net for news about our new XMPP platform later in 2008.
The article linked below should demonstrate a good enough reason to use an enterprise IM platform rather than public IM. Apart from the levels of ’security’ offered by each public IM network it’s fairly obvious from the embedded chart that your conversations may not be very private…
How safe is instant messaging? A security and privacy survey
Great news that Jive Software have open sourced the Enterprise features of OpenFire, read the post here.
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