IM 2.0

By Tim Julien | February 19, 2008

There are some interesting things going on Instant Messaging land these days. There is potentially going to be a shift from closed proprietary networks to ones built on an open standard called Jabber (aka XMPP, Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol). The technical details of Jabber, which I’ll explain below, make this a very big deal.

The biggest IM providers are MSN, AOL, Yahoo, and Google. For years, the first three operated proprietary, closed protocols. If you’re logged in to AOL, you can’t talk to people logged in to MSN (there have been some efforts to link these networks; but in such a way that the closed proprietary protocols are still used). You can’t reuse your contacts across accounts, just as my Myspace contacts can’t be reused by Facebook.

Then Google entered the game. Instead of creating their own IM protocol, they implemented an existing well known IM protocol originally called Jabber, now called XMPP. XMPP had been around for a while and had been implemented most notably by several enterprise collaboration suite providers. But Google implementing it caused the big three to wake up and take notice.

Well, they have. In January AOL announced experimental support for XMPP. And just last week it was discovered that Yahoo is doing the same.

(Wildly speculative observation: Google announced long ago that they would work with AOL to make their IM protocols interop. The assumed reason was to combat a Yahoo - MSN IM interop that was announced. But the Google - AOL interop never materialized. Instead you see AOL announcing (two years later) support for XMPP which obviates the need for a Google - AOL integration - since they would be speaking a common language. It appears that Google and AOL have finally achieved what they stated they would; which in turn put pressure on Yahoo to join in the love-fest.)

Why is this a big deal? Well, from the point of view of existing IM users, it means that I’ll be able to talk to users on different networks. Beyond that, it doesn’t mean much. As a user of, say, AOL IM, I don’t care too much that the messages I exchange are done over a proprietary AOL messaging protocol or some open standard. I only care that it works. But to crazy software developers like myself, who like to dream big, it’s a really, really big deal. Here’s why.

XMPP is XML over TCP/IP which is:

• an open standard. Those are the ones that tend to make it in the long run. And it means that anyone can implement it, and get to play in the game.
• extensible. This means that it is designed so that developers can layer additional features on top of it.
• federated. If an XMPP server implements federation then users on different networks can communicate. This means, for example, that when I’m logged into Google Talk, I can talk to AOL users.

If you’re still yawning, consider that TiVO recently announced that it is using XMPP for a whole host of features that have nothing to do with chatting. Take a gander at the XMPP extensions and you’ll see that the people driving the XMPP standards are also thinking big. There are many features you can layer onto the IM social graph (aka buddy list) that having nothing to do with chatting.If AOL and Yahoo continue down the XMPP path, this will put tremendous pressure on MSN to follow suit. And I believe it will spark a wave of IM 2.0 startups (not just ones focused around mobile IM, which is where you see a lot of the focus today).

Consider that everyone IMs. Websites come and go - but IM remains. What’s important about that is that your social network persists over many, many years. My friendster buddy list is essentially useless - since I no longer use that site. But my AIM buddy list, which I still use, has been around for over 10 years. And with XMPP, it’s now reusable. It could become the standard machine-readable way to represent a social network.

IM is getting standardized … it’s getting standardized on an open standard … and the open standard is extensible.