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

Comments

[Matt Tucker]

This particular announcement is silly. The "UI" for the the example service is a Linux administration tool for browsing XMPP protocol internals. That's like launching an enterprise social networking tool with a generic LDAP browser.

However, there's compelling ideas here. XMPP is very well suited for federating social technology. In fact, the Twitter service itself is on the cutting edge of this trend through their experimental XMPP support. I just spent the weekend at the Social Graph Foo camp and there's a lot of energy around using XMPP for this type of federation. It will be fun to see what develops.

[Mickaël Rémond]

Hello,

The UI is not a "Linux Administration Tool", it is directly the interface of the Instant Messaging client. The fact that you do not like the interface of this particular is another topic, thought.