Hi Dirk, (Cc:'ing the XMPP Social list, ... to be , well, social. And in case others are interested...)
We talked briefly at FOSDEM during the q/a for your presentation on the XMPP day. I was wondering if you'd be interested to collaborate on specs for remote control APIs mediated by XMPP. I understand you've been focussing mainly on cross-cutting infrastructural issues (security, device pairing and authentication). My day job is part of a 3 year EU project "NoTube" based on exploration of relationship between TV and various Web technologies, particularly around user profiles, personalisation, richer metadata. One thing I'm trying to encourage the project to do is to explore XMPP as a general information-bus between users, devices (handheld and TV / media centre). I've bounced some ideas off of Ralph Meijer at MediaMatic here in Amsterdam, and the rough idea is that a TV or media centre would have a full Jabber JID, whereas user apps on a mobile phone (EPG / programme guide / ratings and recommendations) might sign into the XMPP world on behalf of their primary human user. But it's clear from your slides you've given more thought to all this than I have. For querying a program guide, I think we'll probably explore using W3C SPARQL query language, either via http or if xmpp makes sense then along lines of http://svn.foaf-project.org/foaftown/jqbus/intro.html .. the project includes the BBC as partners, and they have some SPARQL databases for program content already, and we're using SPARQL to access most other data within the project too. My hope is that - during the NoTube project which runs 2009-2011) we'll see some simple spec for folk like Boxee, MythTV, Freevo, maybe even Tivo, ... such that those media centre apps could attadch themselves to a Jabber/XMPP network and allow suitably authorised parties to play/pause/rewind, browse content listings, send recommendations/ratings, navigate on-screen menus etc. So far I'm pretty much in fact-finding mode - much of which is bookmarked via http://delicious.com/danbri/notube - http://delicious.com/danbri/remotes I did make a quick-and-nasty mockup using Boxee, since that offers a localhost http: API, such that a remote XMPP account could send pause() messages that toggle playing state of the media centre. I also made a *lot* of screenshots of relevant iphone apps to get a sense for what exactly is out there in terms of remote control smartphone apps, TV listing apps, control-your-desktop apps, etc. I'd hope an XMPP-based proposal for basic play/pause/forward/back etc could be made which allowed more such functionality to be exposed but using XMPP as the layer that connects smartphones to devices. The main advantage I see here is that there's some potential to move from device to device pairing, towards more social permissioning. Rather than my TV being bound to your (current) iphone, I'd hope that my TV could understand that I've given you (and hence *all* your devices) permission to browse my video files, turn the TV over, etc. If this broad direction makes sense (to dmeyer, to anyone!), I'd appreciate advice on how/where to continue such a discussion in a way that best fits with the XMPP community's habits... thanks for any thoughts, cheers, Dan
