On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 2:37 AM, Arc Riley <arcri...@gmail.com> wrote: > That's hilarious! But jokes about PHP scripts and internet appliances > aside, there *is* a real solution to this that's already accepted by the > community at large. > It's called XMPP - eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol. > Thanks to Google and Livejournal there's already a huge userbase. It's > inter-server, so all those @gmail.com users can use any federated XMPP > service, and federation is easy.
XMPP is a technology to assist in the distribution of data. It can be used to assist in the interchange of data however a grail it is not. > Many services already offer XMPP access to their data, especially > microblogging services like twitter and identi.ca. It doesn't matter what > XMPP server you connect to (ie, gmail.com). If a feature isn't already > supported by XMPP you can write an extension. Thanks to existing and > well-deployed standards like pubsub > (http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0060.html) many new services don't need to > extend XMPP for their new functionality. What's at issue is that the meaning of data is still left as an interpretation to the student. Yes, you can shove arbitrary data and publish that data. That data still needs to be adopted as a standard by everyone. As an example, connect to google chat using PSI IM, and go ahead and try to get notifications when you have new emails. > Facebook has flirted with XMPP in the past, they're currently planning to > add support just for Facebook IM. There are already a number of XMPP > gateway apps for Facebook hosted by 3rd parties. In Facebook's defense, > they have an open API and allow anyone to host Facebook apps on their own > servers that can access user's information and which have equal access to > publish snippets to friend's pages. There are many libraries to work with > Facebook's API. The crux of the complain is, however, that you have to authenticate with facebook. > So a new model capable of obsoleting the existing paradigms, being as it > must interoperate, is best implemented as XMPP service software. Nothing in XMPP forces anyone or anything to actually share data over the wire. And many would suggest it's actually a bad idea to open it all up to external, potentially untrustworthy, JIDs. In the world of federation, you have to trust the remote servers. With wide scale adoption of XMPP federated servers, you potentially run the same risks as MySpace, but with no central lockdown point any longer. Don't get me wrong. Sharing data via XMPP can be a great thing. But it is *NOT* the cure. The internet is primarily built around the idea of the routing of anyones data, in any way possible. XMPP is the SMTP of XML snippet routing. There is no concept of authentication of data in the world of the giant IPv4 network which has grown to be known as the internet. And that has allowed it to flurish. Minus some utopian identification service which can be trusted 100%, no technology will solve the issue. As part of that, the more XMPP is utilized, the more issues which crud up other protocol spaces will migrate there. Think I'm wrong? Example. Suuuuuure, you can disallow any traffic from anyone NOT on your contact list. However, how do they get there? They request to be there. Guess what's added to that? A message! Hrm.. Sounds like Spam 2.0 to me! :-D -- -- Thomas _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
