A long time ago in a far away land there was Jabber. In the same era in a strange land (SF State) we installed Jabber and had fun with it. This was a time when PDAs ruled and Handspring was king. Remember that time? It was a long time ago indeed.

I had a Handspring that had a modem powered by two AAA batteries. I was tinkering with messaging protocols, but the problem with most IM protocols was that they were proprietary, so there were no apps for Handspring. That led me to Jabber. First, I signed up for an account on their server and got the IM going on two different computers. It was fun to watch the XML stream going between the two ends. Next, I downloaded the code and got it running on a server at home. I remember that just like everything else back then, there were several attempts at the "three steps to nirvana": ./configure, make, make install

I finally got Jabber running and what fun it was to have all kinds of clients (including one for Handspring) talking across the server space. I even had a Lego bot keeping an eye on a coffee pot and telling me via Jabber when it got near empty. You can get the code at http://examples.oreilly.com/jabber/ We even tried to get a script to do a nightly dump from class rosters so that we would have pre-populated Jabber lists for class use!

Next, we had IMSA running its own Jabber service. One of the officers wrote up a simple guide/HOWTO about the install and use. By this time, Jabber was no longer called Jabber. It had morphed into XMPP - eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol. This was an attempt to make Jabber grow up into an official IETF standard. There were many groups who bet on SIP (session initiation protocol) but the scope of SIP was limited to initiation. The rest of the conversation had to be handed off to something else. XMPP could do both presence and messaging.

In the mean time, XMPP got adopted by many IM efforts including BellSouth and France Telecom. We saw the rise of several start-ups that either built XMPP servers or hosted them. All along, the likes of Yahoo!, AOL and Microsoft continued to play in silos with their own proprietary protocols. Eventually the big win came in the form of Google adopting XMPP for its own IM service. They even went ahead and came up with a spec called Jingle that allowed VoIP like service over IM.

Yesterday, news came around that AOL is finally looking into XMPP by opening up a server at xmpp.oscar.aol.com Considering the huge user base AOL has for IM, this is significant. What has always intrigued me is that in this day and age, we never question the incompatibilitieas of IM even though we use e-mail - an asynchronous form of messaging - seamlessly. We never think that e-mail sent via AOL will not reach Hotmail accounts, so why be complacent with IM? Why can't IM interoperate? Use open standards!

Note: Did you know the XO laptop from the OLPC project uses XMPP for all its application-level communications?