What, you are probably asking, does all of this have to do with the Google Maps Team and lightning?  Well, as good internet citizens, the Jabber guys documented they protocol and went through the hassle of getting it established as an ITEF standard known as an RFC.  This standard was called extensible messaging and presence protocol, or XMPP.  Many organizations have used this standard as the basis of their own messaging platforms.  Among these was Google, who used it as the basis of Gtalk.  Which, finally, bring me back to the Google Maps Team.  After their technology was bought by Google and turned into Google Maps, they decided to work on something new:  a real-time messaging and collaboration platform.  After eighteen months work, the results, called Google Wave, were previewed at this week’s Google IO conference, and the results are astounding.  I won’t attempt to explain it you just need to watch it:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ

Much as I suspected while watching the video, when I read their published protocol specification at waveprotocol.org, I learned that the whole thing is built on a extensions to XMPP.  At the guts of the Wave are XML DTDs for wave detlas being streamed around, serialized, and sycnronized.   This is going to be huge, and the Maps Team deserves the praise.  But, it all started with the vision of the Jabber folks.

Much to my surprise, the conference quickly redeemed itself.  The “Big Thinkers” eventually shut up and let the tech guy start to work out the details.  In addition to the Twitter guys, who couldn’t return after lunch, there were representatives from Google, Seesmic, Microsoft, Facebook, Identispy, and others.  Evan Prodromou, of Identica and Laconica, presented his Open Micro Blogging specification and he and the other began to hash out the details of how these social communities can share their event streams and how aggregators can add value and federation for everyone.

I still think there is an awful lot of reinventing the wheel here.  As one of the participant pointed out on more than one occasion, many things that Evan is trying to formalize, like federation, are already solve with XMPP and the XEPs.  As I’ve stated before, I think it would make much more sense to build the whole infrastructure on XMPP.  The web is really just a presentation interface, and this is really micro messaging, not microblogging.  Imagine, XMPP routers routing messages of various XML schemas to you based on your criteria, your client renders them for you based on XSL transformations that you specify, and if your client can render that schema then it knows how and to whom you can respond if you wish to participate in the conversation. It’s got a long way to go, but there some really potential here to change both the web and messaging.