Jabber Journal #27 (2007-01-04)

Eight years ago today, Jeremie Miller released the first code for an open chat technology he called Jabber. Since the beginning, the logo we've associated with Jabber technologies has been the light bulb, indicating the importance of presence and availability information as a catalyst for communication. So it's appropriate to consider the "state of the bulb" at this time of year.

The Jabber community has been growing ever since Jeremie made that first announcement on Slashdot. When I joined the project in November of 1999, a small team of developers had already created the core streaming XML protocol we still use today, but that technology was not well known; whereas now Jabber technology is on the way to becoming a true Internet standard, in large part because the IETF (the main standards body for the Internet) approved the core Jabber protocols in 2004 under the name XMPP. Here are some of the other changes we've witnessed in eight years:

• In 1999, there were only a few Jabber servers running on the Internet, but now there are tens of thousands of servers, including mission-critical deployments at most Wall Street investment banks, large companies throughout the world, the U.S. government, and huge consumer-oriented services like Google Talk, NTT, and LiveJournal Talk.
• In 1999 there were perhaps only a few thousand Jabber users in the world, but now there may be 40 or 50 million users.
• In 1999 there was only one codebase for running a Jabber server, but now there are a dozen.
• In 1999 we had Jabber clients for Windows, Linux, and Macintosh, but now we have clients for just about every computing platform you've ever heard of (and some you haven't heard of!).
• In 1999, Jabber was a small movement on the fringes of the open-source world, but now important hardware and software companies like IBM, Apple, Sun Microsystems, Nokia, Sony, Digium, Psion, and more are all supporting XMPP.
• Although the early developers knew that our streaming XML technology could be used for much more than instant messaging, now we know it for a fact, because that technology is being used to power systems as diverse as voice over the Internet, gaming, point of sale integration, network monitoring, inventory management, expert location, library integration, and geospatial alerts -- plus many other applications that companies don't want to talk about because they consider Jabber to be the "secret sauce" behind their success.

So now we can relax, right? Wrong! We're continually working to improve the security profile of Jabber/XMPP technologies, most recently by establishing an intermediate certification authority that makes it much easier for companies and service providers to offer secure connections to their Jabber servers. We are actively developing an end-to-end encryption technology that will give Jabber users the kind of privacy they would expect when having a chat in their living room or board room. Although the Jabber network has always been virtually spam-free, we are making sure that spam never ravages open instant messaging as it has already done to the world's email infrastructure. We are working to make Jabber technologies more scalable, more robust, more reliable, more powerful, and more fun. We are extending XMPP to enable voice chat, video chat, whiteboarding, and other real-time communication methods. In short, we want to make sure that Jabber/XMPP technologies provide a stable, secure platform for Internet communication for the next eight years and beyond. And we hope you'll be along for the ride.

Jabber on!

--stpeter