Collaborative Thinking

What does Facebook's support for XMPP mean to the enterprise?

If you are a enterprise organization rolling out instant messaging and presence platforms from IBM or Microsoft, then the roadmap that Facebook revealed does not alter what is going on behind the firewall all the much. Organizations involved with unified communications based on SIP/SIMPLE are not going to significantly change their minds or direction because of Facebook per se.

But, a couple of points are worth mentioning. First, this announcement adds further credibility to XMPP as a worthwhile standard that IT architects and infrastructure planners should be aware of - and actively monitor. Second, XMPP should become a core requirement for organizations implementing gateways that federate their internal instant messaging and presence systems with public networks and other platforms (such as Facebook). Third - not only is Facebook supporting XMPP but Twitter is also aligned with XMPP. There have also been on-and-off discussions on possible synergies between XMPP and Atom/AtomPub. Perhaps at no other time has XMPP looked so interesting to so many different audiences.

For IBM, I would expect someone from IBM's unified communication and collaboration team to realize that this is a great marketing opportunity. At some point, I expect IBM to aggressively pursue interoperability between Facebook's XMPP system and the Lotus Sametime Gateway. 

For Microsoft, this news presents them with a problem - they are in a position that is almost impossible to defend. There is absolutely no technical reason why the current Microsoft gateway does not support XMPP today. It is simply a political decision (in my opinion), by the folks at Microsoft as they compete with Google. Granted, GTalk does not have the market share of other public networks (Yahoo!, AOL), but even so, the strategy is clearly not customer-focused at all.

While promoting anything that helps Google might be difficult to accept, Facebook's implementation of XMPP might prompt Microsoft to reconsider. Facebook has a credible install base and its position as a leading social network site, (coupled with Microsoft's partnership with Facebook on other fronts), might likely persuade the company to finally support XMPP within its IM/presence gateway. Such a move I believe would be well-received by many of Microsoft's customers.

Using Facebook Chat via Jabber

Right now we're building a Jabber/XMPP interface for Facebook Chat. In the near future, users will be able to use Jabber/XMPP-based chat applications to connect to Facebook Chat to:

• Communicate with their friends
• See which of their friends are online and view their profile pictures
• Set their statuses

Users can securely authenticate and authorize applications to connect to Chat on their behalf and send messages to their friends just like they can on Facebook.

Facebook Developers | Facebook Developers News

The New Out-Of-Office Message: Twitter and FriendFeed

I was e-mailing a vendor contact as part of a document review process and received this "out of office" message. I think it's perfect. I've cleaned it up a bit below but I think this is a sign of things to come - don't push away, simply redirect:

I'm at the <insert name of event or business trip> between <dates> and will have delayed access to e-mail. If you have an extremely urgent issue, then call me directly at <cell phone info>.

If you want to keep track of me, then follow me via Twitter at http://twitter.com/<name> or via FriendFeed at http://friendfeed.com/<name>.

Out-of-office replaced by shared situational awareness.

XMPP and Microblogging (Twitter)

Via Slashdot: Interesting article, follow the citation link for screen shots of the implementation. 

The example application that illustrate this article is a distributed Twitter-like microblogging platform.

Introduction

Since I designed the first version of the pluggable pubsub module for ejabberd in early 2007, I had in mind to turn it into a powerful application server. I have already blogged about the power of the new API of ejabberd 2.0 pubsub engine. However, this single article does not do any justice to this idea and how it can change the face of the web.

Customizable services based on pubsub is XMPP (eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) at its full speed. The XMPP protocol has been designed since the beginning to be a near real time routing / distribution engine. A piece in the puzzle was missing however. This is where I think our new plugin based pubsub API fills the gap and turn ejabberd into the first XMPP application server.

As a proof of concept and as a way to robustify our API, we have written the Personal Eventing via Pubsub (PEP) as a plugin of our pubsub engine. It is a big specification and should clearly show the potential of the framework.

The XMPP application server: The Twitter case

The PEP implementation was still not enough to demonstrate that ejabberd is a fault-tolerant, highly scalable application development platform for the Web 2.0 era. I decided to start a series of articles demonstrating how to build a distributed Twitter-like microblogging platform based on ejabberd 2.0.

Introducing the XMPP application server: The Twitter example - Process-one

Jabber XCP Delivers Eventing via Pubsub

What will likely become a very critical component of "lifestreaming" that augments Atom/AtomPub (also a fundamental component):

Our developers are at it again, adding support to Jabber XCP for XEP-0163: Personal Eventing via Pubsub, which should be of interest to anyone following the evolution and use of presence technology. XEP-0163 lets users send updates about anything to users on their rosters. Personal eventing lets people easily publish things about themselves - it doesn’t get any more user-centric than this! The updates are sent using the XMPP Publish-Subscribe functionality used in Jabber XCP’s InfoBroker and described in XEP-0060. One way to look at it is that XEP-0163 takes XEP-0060 functionality to a more personal level.

...

The success of Twitter (which has XMPP in its architecture, BTW) and other similar services proves that personal eventing (in addition to presence, in general) is valued in social network settings. Service providers should be interested in the increased stickiness that personal eventing brings to their communities. Once users get used to seeing their friends’ moods, blog posts, activities, etc. they are more likely to stay in the communities which publish these details. The extension of social network technology to enterprise applications is in full swing, so by adding support for Personal Eventing via Pubsub to Jabber XCP, our extensible and highly scalable real-time presence and messaging platform will take the Power of Presence to a more personal and valuable level. The customers we’ve talked to about PEP have some great use cases and they will use this new functionality in their deployments. How about you?

Jabber Filaments Blog » Blog Archive » Jabber XCP Presence Platform Gets Personal (Eventing via Pubsub)

Peter Saint-Andre on Presence

Worth listening - I have enormous respect for Peter and the work that the XMPP community has accomplished. We tend to put XMPP in a box (yet another protocol for instant messaging that also happens to handle presence). That's unfortunate. XMPP has a diverse range of possible applications - for instance, there's a lot of talk lately about the synergy between XMPP and lifestream tools (e.g., Twitter) as well as a means to augment Atom/Atom Pub systems. I have no qualm with SIP at all but remain convinced that SIMPLE is fundamentally flawed, is being used by vendor to advance their own agendas, and should not the one-basket-for-all-eggs direction pursued by the industry when it comes to approaching "presence" in a broader sense. SIMPLE will have it's role, but XMPP should not defacto be dismissed as an option.

Peter Saint-Andre is Executive Director of the XMPP Standards Foundation. XMPP (formerly known as Jabber) is today's leading instant messaging protocol. As Skype users know well, IM is nothing without simple presence signaling. Lee and Peter talked about emerging presence.

Lee Dryburgh, host of the March Emerging Communications conference (co-sponsored by Skype Journal), interviewed Peter Saint-Andre (mp3, 48 MB, 50:00).

Skype Journal: eComm2008 blog: Peter Saint-Andre on Presence

More On Presence And The Social Feed

Timely article that builds on some recent "thinking out loud" thoughts on the direction of presence I posted yesterday. UC strategists should be thinking in terms of where presence intersects with social feeds. Collaboration and KM strategists should be thinking of how a feed syndication platform improves communication, information sharing, community-building. Architects looking at social media should examine feed syndication platforms as critical middleware for all-things-2.0.

Facebook news feed has been a hit with users because it automatically displays the latest photos, newest friends, and other updates from your Facebook friends.

The problem, though, is that most people use any number of other sites as well — such as messaging service Twitter, video site YouTube, photo-sharing site Flickr, to name a few. There’s been no good way to see what your friends are doing on different sites around the web from one central place.

Now, there are two feed services, FriendFeed (screenshot, above) and Plaxo Pulse, that do a good job of solving this problem. I expect both — and especially Friendfeed — to become a hit this coming year, as I’ll explain, below.

FriendFeed and Plaxo Pulse let you designate friends, then easily add feeds of your activities from other sites. The result is that each user sees a continuous stream of updates from friends — Twitter messages, uploaded YouTube videos, blog posts, shared Google Reader items, and much more. Both FriendFeed and Plaxo include community discussion features, such as commenting on others’ items.

Other startup competitors that are offer similar services include Spokeo and clip-sharing sites Plum and Clipmarks.

VentureBeat » Analysis: Plaxo and Friendfeed, pushing the “feed”

Social Presence: Time To Push The Reset Button

Just a collection of rough notes, thinking and musing on the next generation of "presence" that I've been wanting to assemble for a while:

• Presence has been historically been associated with a variety of communication technologies – IM, phone, mobile, etc. It is often associated with the consumer space where ICQ and AIM emerged as very popular tools that brought presence into the mainstream. You can go back further to find technical roots. Enterprise presence began in 1998 with IBM Sametime. Jabber emerged and made XMPP popular which has its own presence capability (2000-ish).
• People participate in presence systems because they wanted to broadcast their availability – to make other people, namely their friends, aware that they were online in case they wanted to contact them in some manner. You want to let people know that you were available – and contactable – through some type of communication tool.
• Presence started as a fairly simplistic concept. In the beginning, you usually had to manually set your presence – “away”, “busy”, “invisible”. Some tools would let you customize your status message. Tools became more intelligent and sometimes would derive your presence (lack of computer activity would change presence to “away”).
• "Aggregated presence” also emerged – other devices could be probed to influence your presence status. For instance, if you were on the phone, and the phone was connected to the presence system, you would be marked as “unavailable” or “on phone” until you hung up (which would cause your presence revert back).
• "Rich presence” was another advancement where presence was augmented with additional information about you. For instance, someone could click on your presence information and view a user profile (business card) that often displayed additional information (title, department, etc).
• Some presence systems were also smart enough to know what tools you were using or what part of a system you were in (“Mike is in the document library editing ABC file”).
• Presence continues to mature and now bumps into the Attention Management space as well. We want presence to help with attention management tools that deflect undesirable noise but let through relevant signals.
• People often talk about the killer app for presence which brings up presence-enabled applications and presence-enabled workflow (presence of a role entity vs. presence of a person). Presence indicators often appear inside an application context not just in the communication tool ("buddy list"). You are in an e-mail client and see that the sender is online – why reply when you can chat via IM or on the phone.
• Now we see more capabilities to categorize presence for instance, and reveal it to different groups (my team, my department, my company). And we can federate presence to outside entities (Yahoo!, AOL, Google, etc).
• IBM and Microsoft remain the key vendors for presence overall given their market strength but Jabber remains credible. Virtually all communication vendors remain anchored to SIP/SIMPLE. Few support XMPP. Jabber remains the champion for XMPP as the foundation for presence systems.
• Presence begins to become tied to location services now as well. Mashups are possible where you can show presence on a map. Mobile presence gets a boost from vendors like Iotum that show how an application can leverage presence.
• So we’ve been on this linear track of presence in terms of evolution and maturation – always anchored around communication – getting more intelligent – better aggregation of presence through multiple connections to other communication tools – richer and so on.
• Presence is a key underpinning for unified communications.

And now its time to get off this train track - time to push the reset button.

• Not completely, but the new perspective on presence is that it’s more social and should not be so strongly tied to communication tools for contact purposes. If you look at what’s going on in the consumer space and in social networking – the notion of a lifestream (like the Facebook news feed) and Twitter is a much more relevant model for think about a next generation “presence” framework in a broader sense. Presence is a stream not a static thing that flips once in a while when the system detects an event. We need to step away from presence as being fundamentally owned by UC and think of how it is used in a much more social context.
• "Social Presence" is the uber concept that will build around a feed syndication platform that needs to have backward support for existing presence solutions but opens up the door to many more non-communication activities to become part of what makes you “present”. Presence is really about what you are doing – part of that is for other people to know so they can connect with you but also just to know socially (e.g., ambient intimacy).
• That’s the point I’d like people to take away on presence – it’s beyond UC. It’s about the social aspects of how people observe and create a sense of being connected by having a means for people to let others know what they are doing, where they are, etc.
• Technically, it’s architecturally about a feed syndication platform of which communication tools can participate in but so can a large variety of other systems now locked out of presence systems. Traditional rich presence will continue because there are unique aspects of presence when it does come to UC. But the center of gravity will shift away from UC (and UC vendors).

Summary:

1. Presence is a key component of unified communications. Presence must seamlessly transition across mobile, IM, etc. Presence must be aggregated from the multiple devices and applications that we interact with. Presence must support richer information about us. Presence must be supported by more intelligent services that enable other solutions like attention management.

2. Presence is broken. It is owned by UC vendors that are not moving the technology forward. Presence makes too many assumptions (SIP/SIMPLE) and has a terrible data model. Vendors are not working with the standards and are not really interested in moving presence into something more open where many other systems and vendors can participate - given the importance of presence, vendors want to "own" the solution and leverage it for their own agenda.

3. People are moving onto the next generation of presence (Social Presence) and looking at social networking as the new model (Facebook). Presence needs to be more of a stream – no longer just about being online and available – more about what you are doing. This means pushing the reset button on presence from a UC and SIP/SIMPLE perspective. We need to think of presence more along the lines of a lifestream or activity stream where a variety of information is published into the stream and people can subscribe to the entire stream or to different types of information placed into the stream.

4. This next generation of presence will require a feed syndication platform that is likely built on top of Atom/AtomPub, microformats etc. Twitter and Facebook are the new models for this broader perspective on presence.

Turning E-Mail Into a Social Network

Sometimes consumer vendors (and people that cover consumer trends) can learn from enterprise software vendors and historical trends related to knowledge management and collaboration. Analyzing e-mail to derive relationship connections is not new at all - if you turn back the hands of time you will come up with Tacit and other vendors that were in the "expert location" business back in the late nineties that mined e-mail systems to establish expertise and associations between people. Vendors like Contact Networks continue to exploit this source of relationship information as part of their solutions in the market. Microsoft is undertaking a similar approach with its future Knowledge Network system.

So we have "social network sites" (credit to Danah Boyd) which are explicit entities where people declare relationships - and we have inferred social networks which are derived through observation and analysis. These types of services (inferred social networks) are more-or-less application features that disappear to some degree into the background context of the system you are interacting with at the moment (an e-mail system in the case of Yahoo). The idea of surfacing contextual social graphs based on the activity at-hand is an important trend to note. As developers work to add "social awareness" to applications (just like we add presence-awareness), it is important to begin thinking of the relationship/connection engine as an important middleware platform component within enterprise architecture.

Ignore Orkut, OpenSocial, Yahoo Mash and Yahoo 360. Google and Yahoo have come up with new and very similar plans to respond to the challenge from MySpace and Facebook: They hope to turn their e-mail systems and personalized home page services (iGoogle and MyYahoo) into social networks.

Web-based e-mail systems already contain much of what Facebook calls the social graph — the connections between people. That’s why the social networks offer to import the e-mail address books of new users to jump-start their list of friends. Yahoo and Google realize that they have this information and can use it to build their own services that connect people to their contacts.

....

This has several features. First, the e-mail service is made more personal because it displays messages more prominently from people who are more important to you. Yahoo is testing a method that can automatically determine the strength of your relationship to someone by how often you exchange e-mail and instant messages with him or her.

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Yahoo Mail will also be extended to display other information about your friends as well. This can be a link to a profile page, and also what Yahoo calls “vitality” –- updated information much like the news feed on Facebook. There could also be simple features that are common on social networks, like displaying a list of friends whose birthdays are coming up.

Inbox 2.0: Yahoo and Google to Turn E-Mail Into a Social Network - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog

Trivial Pursuits To You Is Ambient Intimacy To Me

I noticed this article from Peter and his blog post: There is an interesting cross-over between microblogging and persistent group chat (e.g., Parlano) and concepts related to social presence. A "Twitter-like" capability is important from many angles within an enterprise setting. As the article below points out - the value of seemingly aimless commentary may not make sense to anyone else but those associated with each other - it might be as simple as "white noise" that fills in the background. Leisa Reichelt coined the term "ambient intimacy" and tools such as Twitter fit into that definition. Architecturally, as I mentioned in this post, Twitter is a multi-channel messaging routing platform which provides users with many different ways to send, track and receive messages (or posts). The wide range of available plug-ins allows me to use Twitter from Microsoft Outlook 2007, Skype, Google Talk, Facebook and the Twitter web site itself. Senders no longer dictate to receivers the tool and surrounding user experience. From a community-building perspective, this type of water cooler environment has always existed and this is just another example of how that metaphor can be manifested online. But Twitter can be used for more purposeful reasons as we've witnessed lately with the crisis in San Diego.

So it is far too early to dismiss these types of tools or relegate them to childish play. In order to build social applications within an enterprise context, we need to observe and learn from how these tools are being used out in the real world.   

But it's too soon to dismiss the microblogging services' potential as businesses. Although all offer free registration, they could charge their customers and communications companies for premium functions. Pownce already charges its users for the ability to send large files. Perhaps the wireless carriers might pay the services to act as application providers for their customers; when mobile-­telephone users bought a plan, they could select Jaiku as an option. Another possible source of income could be advertising that is pertinent to a particular user; advertisers and the media buyers at advertising agencies, for all their disenchantment with print publications and broadcast media, will still spend good money for the type of effective, targeted advertising offered by Google AdWords and AdSense. Finally, the services could be used for direct marketing. Already, a few companies (including Twitter itself) are using microblogs to directly market themselves; since users don't receive promotional posts unless they've chosen to receive them from the corporations they follow, the blasts are presumably welcomed.

My own experiments posting semiregularly on Twitter and Pownce produced mixed emotions. I quickly realized that decrying the banality of microblogs missed their very point. As Evan Williams puts it, "It's understandable that you should look at someone's twitter that you don't know and wonder why it should be interesting." But the only people who might be interested in my microblogs--apart from 15 obsessive Pontin followers on Twitter--were precisely those who would be entertained and comforted by their triviality: my family and close friends. For my part, I found that the ease with which I could communicate with those I love encouraged a blithe chattiness that particularly alarmed my aged parents. They hadn't heard so much from me in years.

Technology Review: Trivial Pursuits

Social Presence: We Need To Push The Reset Button

Presence right now is horribly deficit and simplistic. I believe presence should not be defacto tied solely around a unified communication system - we need to step back and think of presence in a broader sense (including the social aspects) than what we have today in terms of being on-hook/off-hook with a phone or whether I am sitting at a PC (or Mac) and available (or not because I am busy with something).

There are some folks thinking out-of-the-box (Alec Saunders at Iotum with his concept of "new presence"). But existing vendors (namely Cisco, IBM and Microsoft) are biased towards advancing what they already have - which leaves us with SIMPLE (ugh) which has a horrible data model for presence and seems to be progressing at a glacial pace. There are some efforts underway to extend SIMPLE with "Rich Presence" but Microsoft is not implementing it and as far as I know, neither is IBM. XMPP could be a better approach but people seem to have blinders on when it comes to thinking about a presence service that is architecturally independent of IM, IP Telephony/VoIP, and SIP/SIMPLE.   

So the continued pontifications on social presence are intellectually stimulating but the reality-check is that until the industry gets together on the fundamentals (including a meta model, meta data, data/relationship model, federation within an intranet, etc) we will continue to see nifty applications that just will not become mainstream and create the type of network effects (in terms of social presence) that people want to see take hold. Without the glue - things tent to fall apart over time.

The Web 2.0 Summit kicks off next week here in San Francisco. Epicenter's Julie Sloane and I will be there, blogging and passing out cards (and just plain passing out).

The official theme this year is "The Web's Edge," whatever that means. But based on murmurings I've read recently, I'd like to propose a less official theme: "The Socialization of Presence."

I got to thinking about this after reading Chris Messina's thought-provoking blog post riffing on Google's acquisition of the social messaging service Jaiku. If you're not familiar with the news, see our coverage on Compiler.

Chris' post refers to a meme started earlier this year by Web 2.0 conference co-chair Tim O'Reilly called the "Web 2.0 Address Book," a nebulous product (yet to be invented) that's basically a location-aware contact list. The idea is that all of our real social apps already exist in the form of e-mail, your phone, IM and Twitter. We just need some glue to make everything work together.

The Next Social Network? It's Web 2.0, And It Knows Where You Are on Compiler