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.

As long as the sites size remains under, say, a few thousand simulataneous users per server, I think this approach will probably work okay if coded efficiently.  However, I still believe that to scale the true national service size companies like Twitter aspire to be, you need a tiered architecture with the subscriptions and routing handled in the messaging server. That server then feeds real-time track searching engines and the database which feeds the website.

It was an interesting conversation and one of the things that became evident quickly is that microblogs are different things to different people and that people’s views on what they are evolve overtime.  For many people, they are simply a sindication service of their friends posts.  For others, it’s really an IM system with a public datastream that can be mined in interesting ways.  The former crowd are happy with the current state of things; the latter found that Twitter lost all of its usefulness when the XMPP interface and its track command went away.  I fall in this latter camp, and I think that the current set of closed ecosystems will never be able to scale to google or yahoo size bacause they are designed as database driven websites first, possibly with a messaging system tacked on.

The other thing I found interesting was how much time they spent talking about federation between services.  This is part of the XMPP specification.  It is a problem that has already been solved if everyone will just talk XMPP.  In fact, because any XMPP server is essentially an XML router, it has the capability to support multiple message schemas simulaneously.  This would allow you to, say, route the text message from your Pownce feed to Twitter, as they are compatible, but not pictures, videos, or longer message that are not.

I’m encourage by the direction projects like Laconica are taking.  This are designed as messaging systems first.  Thus, providing that datastreams the can drive the websites, search engines, and special purpose clients that will eventually meet the needs of both camps.  In the end, I hope that somehow an open pipe can be created between these closed systems.  It will result in richer conversations and more complete data mining.