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?
March 24th, 2008 at 10:21 am
Personally I think – and agree with Robert from Telepathy project here – that presence + messaging could be a system-wide feature, rather than a separate applications.
However, I’d probably put it more into the mail client as a primary interface, since it’s a communication feature, rather than the browser.
The JavasScript API for web-based contents is certainly a needed feature.
Together with Massimiliano – author of SamePlace you just mentioned – and a few others we’re trying to develop a technology, sometimes called Xicklets, sometimes just Jabber API for JavaScript, which would be similiar to the technology you see in sameplace nowadays, however standardized.
It’s also similiar to the meebo platform, or the upcoming MSN javascript API.
Personally I’m responsible for enabling pure web-based clients to exploit the functionality provided by the API, in a secure manner.
There’s much work needed, and we are eagerly accepting people who want to work with us on such problems :)
In the future, I expect widely deployed clients, like Pidgin and Psi, to have a plugin interface for firefox, which exposes the functionality much like sameplace, while maintaining their own look-and-feel on the desktop.
The mailing list is here:
http://mail.jabber.org/mailman/listinfo/api
(We all have each other on jabber of course, and it’s a very fresh list, so not much traffic yet)
January 8th, 2009 at 9:04 am
I’m interested in the picture you have of the old men talking on the steps for one of our advertising campaigns. Where did you find it? We’re a small nonprofit in Washington State, we do job training for low income folks.
Thanks!