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2007-01-28

Picture This

More photos.

When you give as many conference talks as I do, eventually someone is going snap some photos of you. That happened to me twice at EuroOSCON 2006, the shooters being Edwin Mons and Piers Cawley -- check out their photos here and here (that last one is a bit freaky, eh?).

Posted on 2007-01-28 at 20:43. File under personal.

~ link ~

2007-01-26

stpeter.readme

Taking account of the bus factor.

The other day I almost got run over at the intersection of Wynkoop and 18th Streets in downtown Denver (no, don't panic, it wasn't that close -- but if you drive a dark green Ford pickup truck with Colorado license plate 660-KJK, please know that you are a stop-sign-running, cell-phone-talking idiot who needs to pay closer attention to his driving). The experience made me realize that I really need to write up a README describing everything I do in running the XMPP Standards Foundation -- routine tasks, necessary passwords, relevant contacts, and so on. I already have a README for the role of the XMPP Extensions Editor, but a more general "stpeter.readme" is in order, too. I'll add that to my .plan for sure.

Posted on 2007-01-26 at 20:01. File under jabber.

~ link ~

2007-01-23

Extended Conversation

The voice of the XMPP Standards Foundation.

After some discussion among the Board of Directors of the XMPP Standards Foundation, we have decided to launch an official blog: Extended Conversation. And yes, we agree with Stowe Boyd that the press release is dead, so expect official announcements at the weblog from now on.

Posted on 2007-01-23 at 11:49. File under jabber.

~ link ~

2007-01-22

Shine On

In which our grand strategy is revealed...

Carlo Zottmann follows up on my reply to his original post by clarifying his concerns:

I was talking about wide-spread adoption of XMPP/Jabber by the average IM user. XMPP is a superior protocol in my eyes, and I was wondering why it didn't take the public IM landscape by storm. That said, as impressive these numbers are, in my eyes corporate or governmental clients and services [don't] really count, mostly because in these cases the employer (be it a company or a country) dictate which client to use. Now if all these people would use XMPP IM clients at home as well, then that would really make a splash. Now I was wondering why not everyone is using an IM client that uses this superior protocol, and the reason is: there is no client that does really impress the public.

OK, here I reveal our grand strategy. Remember what email was like in '92 or '93? You had CompuServe and Prodigy and MCIMail and so on, and you couldn't communicate with people on other services. Then those services got the religion of open standards and they started using SMTP and everyone had a common language and all was well.

Unforunately, we're still trying to get to that point in the world of real-time communications (IM etc.). So if you're online using your AIM client, you can't chat with your friend on MSN or Yahoo. It's as if you needed a phone for Cingular, a phone for Sprint, a phone for Verizon, etc. Stupid.

Now, how do we solve that problem? While I agree that we need some really polished Jabber clients, I don't think that will solve the problem of communication silos, because the problem is more political than technical (yes, it's also social, because the buddy list is the center of the universe, but we'll get to that).

One way to attack the problem is to try to get one of the major IM services to use XMPP. Sounds easy, right? Well, not really. How are you going to talk Yahoo! or AOL into ripping out their entire infrastructure just to switch to an open standard that happens to do everything they can do today but not all that much more? Ain't gonna happen.

So we need to find a pain point for the consumer IM services, and that happens to be corporate IM. Big companies don't want all their IM traffic going through some third-party data center in Reston, Virginia or Redmond, Washington. They need and want to have control over their communication services. And they have shown that they don't think of AOL or Yahoo as a vendor of corporate IM solutions (Microsoft is a different story, though MSN is a different beast entirely from Microsoft's enterprise IM offerings). So these big companies use XMPP-based server software that they can host in-house (or they just use whatever IBM or Microsoft gives them).

This userbase of enterprise IM users has grown dramatically and continues to grow. There are tens of millions of such users. And contrary to what Carlo asserts those enterprise users do matter, because the consumer IM services would love for their siloed users to communicate with those corporate IM users (the corporations are where all the interesting commercial services exist).

How to make that happen? Enter XMPP. It's an open standard with a strong client-server model for interdomain federation. If you have an XMPP gateway and some smart federation policies in place (perhaps even a common CA for server authentication), all of a sudden your users can communicate with users at the banks and healthcare companies and so on in a secure, authenticated, spam-free environment. Like email, but really fast, with presence -- and the bad guys can't assert that they are service@paypal.com or whatever and indiscriminately spam your users.

So a big part of our strategy all along has been to build out the network of companies and service providers who are using XMPP. In 1999, when I joined the Jabber movement, there were perhaps 500 or maybe 5000 users. Now there are 50,000,000 or more (it's a decentralized technology, so we can't count them all). And there are more every day, as more companies and universities and governments roll out XMPP-based servers and as service providers like Google Talk and Live Journal Talk and radiusIM keep joining the network (sometimes adding the potential for millions of new users in one fell swoop). That huge army of Jabber users is starting to put pressure on other providers of enterprise IM software, as witness IBM's announcement that they will federate with native XMPP servers through an XMPP gateway for Lotus Sametime. And it's starting to put pressure on the huge consumer IM services, too, as witness persistent rumors about an AOL XMPP gateway.

True, those are "gateways" or specialized connectors, not native functionality (Lotus Sametime and AOL would still use their own proprietary technologies for IM). But that's how SMTP took over, too -- gateways first, then native support. It's no surprise that none of the consumer IM services or big enterprise IM vendors have fully converted to XMPP yet, because it's a big job. But the likes of AIM and IBM are inching closer as that army of Jabber users exerts some subtle and not-so-subtle market pressure. The key is to keep growing the network and userbase of companies and services providers who are deploying XMPP-based services to their employees and users, but that doesn't seem to be a problem because the Jabber juggernaut seems to have tremendous momentum.

As I mentioned in the Jabber Journal #27 or a recent blog post, we have been working on Jabber technologies for eight years now. Once upon a time it was easy to ignore the Jabber "movement" because it was just a few open-source hackers. But we have persistently kept building out those technologies -- standardizing them as XMPP through the IETF, extending them in the XMPP Standards Foundation, building more and more client and server implementations (open-source and commercial), deploying tens of thousands of XMPP-based services at companies and universities and government agencies, winning over the likes of Google and NTT and Live Journal, and perhaps most important never disappearing from the technical radar screen.

All that work isn't necessarily glamorous. It doesn't make a splash in the way that immediately winning over a major consumer IM service would (yes, Google Talk was such a splash, but it's not one of the established players). Yet it was necessary to do all that unglamorous work in order to lay the groundwork for what we have achieved so far, and it is necessary to keep plugging away at that unglamorous work in order to enable the progress yet to come. I happen to think that our future progress will involve some big splashes. Maybe one splash will be a major consumer IM service opening up to the broader XMPP network. Maybe another splash will be the kick-ass Jabber client of your dreams. I don't have a crystal ball and I don't have all the answers, but I do know we have proved that we are willing to do the unglamorous work that makes more big splashes increasingly likely. And that's why the Jabber juggernaut just keeps on rolling along...

Posted on 2007-01-22 at 15:49. File under jabber.

~ link ~

2007-01-19

On The Move

Out of the cities, into the exurbs.

Michael Barone has a fascinating analysis of some county-level American census data here. His conclusions:

1. Americans continue to flee the central cities, especially New York, San Francisco, Chicago, L.A., and Boston.
2. That outmigration is tempered somewhat by immigration from outside the U.S., but only in L.A. does immigration offset internal outmigration.
3. The true American boomtowns today are Phoenix, Las Vegas, Tampa, Atlanta, and Orlando.
4. Americans continue to move south and west in droves.
5. Almost all the exploding counties tend to vote conservative Republican, almost all the imploding counties tend to vote liberal Democratic.

The results comport with the research of Joel Kotkin -- though it would also be interesting to look at percentage increases and decreases rather than raw numbers.

Posted on 2007-01-19 at 22:03. File under society.

~ link ~

4554

Oil-consumption tipping point?

There's much talk of a tipping point in this WSJ article (HT: Glenn Reynolds), which notes that in 2006 oil consumption dropped in the developed countries dropped for the first time in twenty years. It's funny how consumption responds to price, eh? Last year I put 4554 miles on my '95 Trooper, and I bet this year the number will be even lower. One swallow does not a summer make, but I for one wouldn't complain if oil-producing countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Venezuela started to feel the pinch of reduced demand...

Posted on 2007-01-19 at 19:09. File under personal.

~ link ~

Are You Shiny?

What Jabber lacks -- and what it doesn't.

Carlo Zottmann complains that "it's hard to find anyone who has a clue Jabber even exists" because "Jabber" lacks that one shiny client with all the fun features that end-users crave.

There are two things here. First, there are 40-50 million people using Jabber technologies these days, but most of them probably don't even know it since they think they're using Google Talk, Live Journal Talk, Chikka, IM services from NTT or BellSouth or Gizmo or whomever, presence services like Jaiku and Twitter, etc. Or they work for FedEx or HP or Adobe or EDS or just about any Wall Street bank and those companies all use Jabber for their in-house IM service. Or they're in the Marines or work for some other government agency that has deployed Jabber. Or they're using something that doesn't even look like IM because it's in fact a network monitoring service or workflow system or whiteboarding app that just happens to use the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol to send around some XML in real time. Or. Well, you get the picture. Jabber/XMPP is fundamentally infrastructure, not a shiny client. Think HTTP, not Firefox.

Now I grant you that it would be really really cool if someone came along and wrote a killer IM client that used XMPP to the fullest with all the doodads and gewgaws your average Internet user loves and some that they didn't even know were possible (which we can do in the Jabber community because we have this deeply extensible XML transport). IMHO building on top of Mozilla would be just the ticket (think Thunderbird or Songbird but for IM -- MynahBird perhaps?). But I'm not a coder so I'm not the one to make that happen. All we've done so far is build out the core infrastructure and standards, which has laid the groundwork for some enterprising open-source coder to make a real name for himself (or herself!) by building a kick-ass Jabber client for the ages. Will someone do it? I don't know, because that kind of thing can't be planned from the top down in a standards organization, it needs to bubble up from some mysterious wellspring of creativity inside some lone developer or small team. But if you're interested, drop me a line and I'll see how I can help.

Posted on 2007-01-19 at 12:37. File under jabber.

~ link ~

2007-01-18

♫ New York Woman ♫

Gotham blues circa 1992.

Many years ago when I was living in Atlanta I happened to be in a particularly foul mood one evening so I got out my guitar and wrote a grumpy blues tune about how I missed New York City. Last month I recorded a rough version -- check it out here if you're interested. (And if you live anywhere but Manhattan, don't take it personally, OK? I tell you I was in a bad mood at the time...)

Posted on 2007-01-18 at 22:59. File under music.

~ link ~

Fifty Books

Conceptually culling my collection.

I used to own a lot of books. Then I started selling them off. Eventually I hope to get down to a short list of fifty books (or fewer!). Here's my start at the list, roughly grouped into categories...

Philosophy: I need my two-volume complete works of Aristotle, plus the Nicomachean Ethics in Greek and English (Terence Irwin's translation) in case I get around to rendering it into English. That's 4.

More Philosophy: I want to translate and compile a "best of Nietzsche" sometime. So I need my four-volume Nietzsche in German, plus various translations by Kaufmann and Hollingdale. +15 = 19.

Even More Philosophy: the Tao Te Ching, the works of Epicurus in English and Greek, "A Soviet Heretic" by Yevgeny Zamyatin, and "On Love" by Jose Ortega y Gasset. +5 = 24.

Reference: The two-volume, photo-reduced version of the Oxford English Dictionary, a more user-friendly English dictionary, The Synonym Finder, and dictionaries and grammars for Latin, ancient Greek, and German. +10 = 34.

History: "The Evolution of Civilizations" by Carroll Quigley, "Albion's Seed" by David Hackett Fischer, "The Anglosphere Challenge" by Jim Bennett. +3 = 37.

Fiction: "WE" by Yevgeny Zamyatin, "Anthem" by Ayn Rand, "Les Miserables" by Victor Hugo, "I Am David" by Anne Holm. +4 = 41.

Poetry: The complete poems of Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, A.E. Housman, Sappho (Greek and English), Horace (Latin and English), Emily Dickinson, and Walter Kaufmann. +9 = 50.

Ta-da!

Posted on 2007-01-18 at 22:31. File under personal.

~ link ~

Directoried

XMPP, LDAP, multimedia, and you.

I got word today from Tyler Johnson of Internet2 that our application for XMPP addresses to be added to the H.350 LDAP profile has been approved by the ITU. It's a dreadfully boring geeky thing, but it will enable organizations who want multimedia-friendly user directories to include Jabber IDs for better integration between the IM world and the voice and video world.

Posted on 2007-01-18 at 14:33. File under jabber.

~ link ~

Clear Again

Back to the zen inbox.

For the first time since September, my inbox is clear. Wow, what a good feeling.

Posted on 2007-01-18 at 12:57. File under personal.

~ link ~

2007-01-17

Noisy World

Turning down the volume.

Why is the world so full of noise? So many people yammering on the phone all day like they can't stand to be alone in their own silence and solitude for more than two minutes. Television sets blaring away at the airport and the car repair place and the dentist's office. Those incessant announcements about homeland security threat levels being raised to orange or puce or mauve or whatever it is now. The visual noise of advertisements and billboards and pop-up ads and junk mail and spam. The vitriolic ravings and ceaseless chatter of talk radio and politicians and pundits. It's all gliding over the surface of things, indicative of a fundamental fear of diving deep into understanding, introspection, and reflection. And I'm tired of it!

End rant.

Posted on 2007-01-17 at 21:49. File under personal.

~ link ~

The oPhone

Telephony for edglings.

Doc saith:

The market points to a clear and wide opening both for product differentiation and for giving customers what they want.

Which is an open phone.

It is time for an equipment maker to not only make an open phone that is open to all kinds of development, but to turn their carriers into "dumb pipes" for their own good.

I would be far more likely, as a customer, to choose Cingular over Verizon if I knew Cingular supported open application development, "end-to-end" standards and the growth of intelligence and fresh new markets at the edges.

Amen, Doc. Telephony for edglings!

Posted on 2007-01-17 at 21:29. File under technology.

~ link ~

Dumb

Describing stupidity.

Have you ever thought about what it's like to be dumb? I know that I am not the smartest person on the planet, but sometimes you meet someone and you look into their dull vacant eyes and (as Gertrude Stein said about Oakland) you realize that there's no there there. Probably there are incredibly smart people who have the same feeling about me (yes, you know who you are -- I've seen that look). The experience must be quite common, because we have so many phrases for stupidity in the English language. Indeed, a guy named Dan Hersham has collected them and his list runs to 127 entries! Here are some of my favorites:

• The lights are on but nobody's home.
• The elevator doesn't go all the way to the top.
• Not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
• Not the brightest light on the Christmas tree.
• A few screws short of a hardware store.
• A few sandwiches short of a picnic.
• A few fries short of a Happy Meal.
• A few clowns short of a circus.

But he's missing one of my favorites, which we used back in Maine when I was growing up: "Only got half a cord in the woodshed." :-)

And another: "The elevator goes to the top but the doors don't open."

Posted on 2007-01-17 at 19:41. File under language.

~ link ~

Get Me.dium

You got your Jabber in my Web!

You may have heard some buzz about Me.dium, a browser plug-in that enables you to share presence and chat with people who visit similar sites on the web. What you may not know is that Me.dium is powered in part by Jabber technologies. I've been beta testing it for a while now and I think the folks at Me.dium have done a great job using XMPP to add a dynamic element to the web experience. Because they are so excited about XMPP, they have decided to open up their beta to members of the Jabber community. You can find a special invitation here.

Check it out and provide them with some feedback!

Oh, and naturally my Me.dium username is "stpeter", so feel free to add me to your friends list there. (No, Me.dium doesn't yet integrate with the roster at your regular Jabber account, I'm sure they're working on federation...)

Jabber on!

Posted on 2007-01-17 at 14:53. File under jabber.

~ link ~

2007-01-16

Jabbering Along

Jabber, XMPP, and where we go from here.

It's been 8 years since Jeremie Miller released the first open-source Jabber code. Over the years we've focused more on our open protocols, which have been standardized in the IETF along with Internet standards such as HTTP, SMTP, and SIP. When we standardized the core protocols in the IETF we called them the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP). That branding has helped our open technology grow beyond the open-source world -- it has widely infiltrated the financial and defense sectors and has been embraced by the likes of Google, Apple, Sun, Nokia, and Adobe (heck, even AOL is rumored to be developing XMPP connectivity), and there are an estimated 40-50 million end users of Jabber technologies now. What keeps all these disparate interests in sync is our focus on open protocols, which has been guaranteed through our standards work in the IETF and also on XMPP extensions through the Jabber Software Foundation. Given our focus on protocols, we have just renamed the Jabber Software Foundation to the XMPP Standards Foundation.

But it's not just protocols. Unlike what you might find in relation to some Internet standards, we still have a great deal of open-source activity in the Jabber/XMPP community, which helps to keep the commercial vendors honest. We have found that the combination of open standards, open source, and an open community (no fee-based consortiums for us!) has really helped our technology grow. It sure takes a long time to break down the barriers to communication that have been put up by the closed silos of the IM, VoIP, and telco providers. After all, eight years later we're still working to make Jer's vision of the freedom of conversation a reality. But we've been doggedly persistent (yes, we're still here) and that is really starting to pay off.

So what's next? We continue to work on standardization of the core XMPP protocols through the IETF -- currently we're clarifying and updating some details in the specs and will be pushing them forward from Proposed Standard to Draft Standard this year. We continue to work on standardization of a wide variety of XMPP extensions in the XMPP Standards Foundation as published in the XEP series, including the Jingle extensions for voice and video chat. We will soon re-launch the jabber.org website as an information and communications hub for the community of people using and developing Jabber technologies.

Yes, I called them Jabber technologies, not XMPP technologies. Why? Because I think of it this way: Jabber is to XMPP as the Web is to HTTP. I still use the term "Jabber technologies" to refer to this whole universe of real-time communication products and services that companies and open-source projects and independent developers have built over the years. But I use "XMPP" to refer to the XML wire protocols that folks use to create those Jabber technologies. Jabber:XMPP::Web:HTTP. So I'll keep publishing the Jabber Journal at the new jabber.org website, and I'll keep talking about Jabber technologies and the Jabber network and the Jabber juggernaut and all the rest. And speaking of the Jabber juggernaut, I think 2007 is going to be a big year for Jabber technologies. So don't touch that dial! :-)

Posted on 2007-01-16 at 12:00. File under jabber.

~ link ~

2007-01-15

Adoption

Rumors and rumblings.

If the rumors are to be believed, Adobe has invested in XMPP technologies by acquiring Antepo and AOL is working on an XMPP connector. More signs of impending world domination? You be the judge.

Posted on 2007-01-15 at 21:55. File under jabber.

~ link ~

2007-01-04

Frith

The bonds of friendship and freedom.

By wandering through the blogosphere, I've just been introduced to the Old English word frith. Quite a fascinating word, and one that shares the same root with "friend" and "free". I'll post more on the idea upon further reflection.

Posted on 2007-01-04 at 22:13. File under language.

~ link ~

JJ #27

The state of the bulb.

I just published Jabber Journal #27. Enjoy!

Posted on 2007-01-04 at 20:23. File under jabber.

~ link ~

2007-01-02

Accentuation

Am I from Philadelphia?

According to this quiz, my regional American accent is "as Philadelphian as a cheesesteak! If you're not from Philadelphia, then you're from someplace near there like south Jersey, Baltimore, or Wilmington."

Well. I admit that I lived in New Hope, Pennsylvania for a few years before moving to Denver. But I grew up on the North Shore of Long Island and moved to Maine when I was ten, then went to college in New York City, taught English in Czechoslovakia, worked in Atlanta for two years, and relocated to northern New Jersey for three years before Pennsylvania and then Denver. Maybe if you average that out you end up with Philadelphia, but I doubt it. :-)

(Then again, according to this, I'm 97% Mainer. I guess I just don't talk like one...)

Posted on 2007-01-02 at 22:37. File under language.

~ link ~

Wordie 3000

Language addiction redux.

OK, I've hit 3000 words at Wordie. My 3000th word is thrive. I think I'll leave it at 3000 for a while because it's fun to see that big round number on the homepage. :-)

Posted on 2007-01-02 at 21:19. File under language.

~ link ~

2007-01-01

MicroID Spec

Forward motion at last.

For a while now, I've been threatening to write a real spec for the MicroID technology that Jer cooked up last spring. Today I finally got around to making version 0.1. Expect further revisions soon. Send nits directly to me and substantive feedback to the MicroID discussion list.

Posted on 2007-01-01 at 19:59. File under technology.

~ link ~

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