Keith Devens .com

Hey Keith, I'm putting this comment in your programming post, seeing as it's about programming... Anyway, you haven't been online and I'm too lazy to email, so I was wondering what you knew about/thought of the Jabber protocol? I've been looking into it (only slightly) and I was wondering how useful it really was. Nobody I know here has any experience with it, however.

If you haven't already, you might want to poke around the site, they are doing some really interesting things, I'm just not sure if I want to jump onboard just yet. What do you think?

http://www.jabber.org/

I looked into Jabber back in the day, before it was ever released, and I idealistically hoped that it would become the basis of some unified instant messaging framework, but unfortunately that never happened.

I don't have any recent experience with it, but the impression I get is that it's very well designed. It seems to have plenty of libraries available and good documentation, and it's "real" and people actually build things off of it.

If you have something it would be useful for, there's no reason not to jump on board. What were you thinking of using it for?

Well, they have a neat data push model, where users can subscribe to a message feed and get the messages automatically... something I thought was kind of neat.

I was considering writing a weblog/news/whatever updater through the jabber protocol. Ex. type a weblog post in a jabber chat window and it gets published to the blog. Payload is XML, and while I loathe it, there are enough things out there to do the parsing for me (yay expat!). Also, when people comment on the site, it could send me a jabber message about it. Likewise, I could do crazy stuff like track visitors by IP... like if you had a Jabber account, any IM system can gather your IP address... if your IP address was viewing my site, it would send me a message saying you were currently visiting my site. It could also help manage the site... when a 404 happens it could message me, for example... I just find IM so much more elegant than email, especially if I'm right at my computer when it happens and I can do a realtime diagnostic. There is also the obvious possibility to allow people to subscribe to the jabber feed for a certain post and then they will be IMed any time someone comments on a post, and possibly (haven't looked into it) they could just comment right back in the IM window and the comment will appear on the blog, and be sent to everyone else who subscribed, etc... instant topical chat!

Of course, I'm just throwing out ideas. I came across the site, having heard of Jabber back well before it had anything tangible (and thus I dismissed it), and it looked kinda neat. What do you think?

What do I think? It all sounds cool, though I'm not sure if quite all of that would be feasible. In any case, Jabber seems to me like it's so much more than just IM, but A. I don't understand the design enough to know exactly what it can and can't do, and B. I'm not creative enough to think of all kinds of super-cool uses for it.

It just pisses me off that Trillian doesn't support Jabber. I use Trillian for AIM, ICQ, MSN, and Yahoo (and I do actually have people I talk to who use only one of the four, making Trillian a very welcome program on my machine), and even though Trillian 1.0 (the retail version) has a plugin architecture, nobody has written a Jabber plugin for it. I've been toying with the idea of taking that charge, but you know my time restrictions and other outside factors, so I'm really not in the position to make those promises. I'm just not too keen on having to run multiple IM clients again, even if Jabber is really cool.

I guess I'll have to look into it more and research the feasibility of some of the stuff I mention above. I'll let you know what I find out.

In regards to the updating via Jabber thing... http://jogger.jabber.org/