Upgrade the Web: Do you want your browser to Jabber away?
Aaron Boodman was probably right in thinking that me wanting OpenID in the browser makes more sense as a browser feature, or separate plugin. This is a consumer level feature more than a developer focused one.
As I ruminate in the world of wishful thinking, I started to wonder about Jabber, and how it would be interesting to have XMPP as a native browser protocol.
We do have Jabber plugins, and there are JavaScript libraries that implement Jabber, but shouldn’t this be in the browser?
Jabber seems to be popping up all over the place. It started off as the IM protocol, and now has become a generic, scalable, messaging system. If XMPP was native and reliably in browsers, imagine how it could help the chat in Gmail? It could also transform the chat relationship with the Web. Social browsing as Me.dium does it could become more integrated. For example, I could have a trivial way to enable group chat on Ajaxian. I would love to be on the site and have others who are on there tell me how things are going, give me tips, and have comments feed into the same system. I shouldn’t have said “enable” as I wouldn’t have anything to do with it.
At an API level, we could also access XMPP from JavaScript.
Hmm, actually, is there a way in which this could tie into single sign-on and OpenID? Could XMPP be the way to login?
