centresource interactive agency

So, not to beat the Google IM/XMPP story to death, but I love to make metaphors between XMPP and SMTP, since they are similar protocols for a similar purpose.

I've often said that for years and years of anguish in the instant messaging battleground, Jabber/XMPP has been quietly (too quietly) sitting in the background going "hey, guys? guys! open standard! over here! embrace me! extend me!"

Now, Google has taken the interesting step of embracing XMPP, a protocol designed with the explicit purpose of being an open standard for IM communication on the Internet, except they .. haven't opened it up to the internet. There's no s2s communication -- so talk.google.com is incapable of communicating with the myriad of jabber/XMPP servers already on the Internet.

There's much rampant speculation on why exactly this is (it's a beta, maybe they'll turn it on), but if you can imagine that this is a bit like if AOL, back when it was a glorified BBS, had decided to finally embrace this newfangled open standard on the Internet called SMTP for electronic mail, but .. didn't open it up to the Internet.

It just doesn't make much sense.