I'll keep publishing

News on Twitter Verified Accounts from Mashable.

Twitter Launches Verified Accounts.

This is great news, many people are trying hard to block identity theft on the net so it’s important that new mediums take this seriously as soon as possible, preferably at the design stage!

Look at the difference between XMPP and SMTP(lack of) anti-spoofing features, the ease with which SMTP senders (email) can be spoofed has caused many problems.

On the other hand it’s also spawned a huge IT security industry… hmm.

Another XMPP based platform.

From TechCrunch
Exclusive: BBC leads the next wave of web experience with Hemlock.

I just read an article on The Register about Ray Ozzie and why he thinks Google Wave is “anti-web”.

It’s a bizarre read because if it’s accurate he’s saying that the web relies on open standards, this coming from a Microsoft man, the worlds largest closed OS/Application stack vendor!

He’s probably confused between open standards and open source, but Microsoft has never embraced either of these anyway. How many thousands of hours have developers spent reverse engineering Microsoft protocols and file formats?

But to be fair to Ray he’s probably not the man to be commenting on agile real time web technologies, he’s built his reputation by understanding how large corporates work and building platforms they will use, like Lotus Notes and Groove (now part of Sharepoint).

I think he’s actually defending Mesh, which is built on RSS and Atom payloads, how quaint, good old fashioned poll and pull tech, at least Mesh is using Atom. Maybe someone will put up a Mesh<->Wave gateway.

There’s room for both HTTP polling (Comet, long polling, AJAX etc) and XMPP push on the net. In fact you can do XMPP over HTTP (BOSH). I wonder if Ray realises that the client-server part of Wave is HTTP?

The crux of it is that Wave isn’t “anti-web”, all the end user interaction is via a web browser and HTTP, it’s only the server to server component that uses Google Wave Federation Protocol (which is XMPP’ish).

Perhaps Ray has a new web (HTTP) server to server protocol he’d rather use?

I skipped through the Google Wave video again today and I must say that what they are showing us is a cool(ish) web app that’s really only looking good because of the near real time updates, which are driven by an XMPP back end with some smart HTTP connectivity, BOSH maybe?

So to be more critical than I have been to date, what’s new?

XMPP has been able to do this for years, look at the  ‘… is typing a message’ indicator on Jabber clients, those updates come via small XMPP stanzas (XML snippets) on the wire.

I’d guess that the pages we saw are an HTML rendering of the XMPP (XML) data stream and the real time updates are IQ stanzas, probably defined in Googles extension, I need to take a look.

So to answer my own question, “What’s new?”.  What’s new is a large high profile brand with deep pockets has seen the light and decided to put some R&D and marketing dollars into a project that really does show off the power of XMPP and HTTP combined, that’s the news and it’s good news.

So Wave is a good end point to aim for but it looks like an ‘all or nothing’ platform. It would be years before everyone replaced the mass of corporate email, IM and other collaboration platforms.

I expect we’ll see it as a Google only service for a while, maybe with some other players taking part, but even then they’ll need gateways to regular IM services and email for some time to come.

For now I’ll carry on coding xIMpp and very soon now Cleartext will have something to release that offers some of the messaging features Wave offers over XMPP by aggregating existing email, IM and micro-blogging services. I’m happy with a one step at a time approach.

You know one of the small features off xIMpp that I like is that the tweet’ length display changes colour and goes orange if you’re getting close to the max characters, red when you’re REALLY close to 140 chars and then just gives up if you hit 160 when it realises you’re going to send an email not Tweet

I just noticed Twitter.com does something similar now, using red to flag the length counter.

This reminded me of a feature we had in our 1999 CipherIM IM software installer which showed, using a progress meter type gadget, the strength of a password the user was creating.

You see these things all over the place now giving users feedback on the quality off their password.

There’s another, CipherIM also had chat state notifications, in 1999, the little message that says ‘… is composing a message’, I’m not sure if we were first with all of these but we were certainly close.

Of course the main things CipherIM had which nothing else had at the time was peer to peer crypto, public/private key with signed symmetric keys for each session, something even XMPP still lacks. 

So perhaps I’m in the wrong business, instead of building SaaS systems maybe I should just be patenting ideas to license to other people. Food for thought.

Google announced Google Wave yesterday, described as ‘what would email look like if it was invented today’

Here’s my own bullet point summary;

• Moves Google along the real time web tech path
• Web based, close to real time collaborative messaging and content editing
• Desktop app user experience
• Browser part is Web 2.0+ tech based, that is extensive use of AJAX, HTML 5 etc
• Probably harder to create spam for as they underlying protocol is more secure
• Open sourced, mostly, protocol and some demo code available
• Everyone can run their own Wave servers
• Plugin architecture to add things like Twitter messaging.

You’ve all heard me bash on about XMPP, well Google Waves underlying transport protocol is XMPP with an open extension.
- http://www.waveprotocol.org/whitepapers/google-wave-architecture

In my opinion this will probably replace GMail. Wave’s addressing syntax is probably XMPP so GMail users will already have an account on the GMail domain.

In fact if the whole planet moved to Wave we’d just use our current email addresses, eg I’m already dbanes@cleartext.com on email and XMPP IM so I’d be the same on our corporate Wave server.

Main concern I have is bandwidth and message overhead, there was a lot of realtime data transfer going on in the demo, apparently at a character level, which is madness really.

We’ll have to hoppe that as the dev team is based here in Sydney (the Google Maps guys) that they’ve factored in poorly connected communities.

‘Wave’ is an extension of XMPP.
- http://www.waveprotocol.org/whitepapers/google-wave-architecture

The core of XMPP is ratified by the IETF and the XSF (XMPP Standards Foundation) manages the process of adding new functionality via XMPP Extension Protocols (XEPs)
- http://xmpp.org/extensions/

Hopefully Google will get Wave into the XSF process as a XEP.

I jumped onto OneRiot the beta real time search engine and decided to search for  XMPP as there’s a lot of real time chat about using XMPP as a real time web protocol, the following was the result of the search…

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

I’m hoping to get some Australian XMPP meetups happening, Sydney first then Melbourne. Anyone interested please register here;
http://www.meetup.com/Sydney-XMPP-Meetup/

An interesting use of XMPP.

OMG EnerNOC Brings Instant Messaging to the Smart Grid | Sustainability | Fast Company.

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.

Why XMPP will be huge very soon | Potent Flows.

Spotted on the Twitter time line today;

“lotusfederal: @TwistyRoadsCrvr Let’s talk. Where are we falling short? Our focus is on SIP/SIMPLE, but with XMPP compatibility via ST Gateway and plugins.”

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.

News this week that Google App Engine plans support for XMPP this year.

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.

Also on Twitter, and I agree sooner we’re all using XMPP the better.

Just spotted this on Twitter.

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.

Well, it took a while but I finally got Twitterspy working on our ejabberd server. I’m not at all surprised that the process broke our Yahoo! IM gateway as I had to update to the latest version of Python… the joy of open source R&D

I’ve decided on my Xmas break project, learn abit more about the Erlang progamming language and ejabberd, the XMPP server written in Erlang. To kick start this I just bought the PDF version of Programming Erlang by Joe Armstrong. A weird conincicence here is that we have a demo account on our hosted email platform called jarmstrong@clearemail.net… that must be a sign.

It’s always a sad day when you see something like this…

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

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…