Suqashing Facebook (WAS: Conducting GNHLUG business on Facebook (was Stop! Unix Time))

[Arc Riley]

That's hilarious!  But jokes about PHP scripts and internet appliances
aside, there *is* a real solution to this that's already accepted by the
community at large.

It's called XMPP - eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol.

Thanks to Google and Livejournal there's already a huge userbase.  It's
inter-server, so all those @gmail.com users can use any federated XMPP
service, and federation is easy.

Many services already offer XMPP access to their data, especially
microblogging services like twitter and identi.ca.  It doesn't matter what
XMPP server you connect to (ie, gmail.com).  If a feature isn't already
supported by XMPP you can write an extension.  Thanks to existing and
well-deployed standards like pubsub (
http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0060.html) many new services don't need to
extend XMPP for their new functionality.

Facebook has flirted with XMPP in the past, they're currently planning to
add support just for Facebook IM.  There are already a number of XMPP
gateway apps for Facebook hosted by 3rd parties.  In Facebook's defense,
they have an open API and allow anyone to host Facebook apps on their own
servers that can access user's information and which have equal access to
publish snippets to friend's pages.  There are many libraries to work with
Facebook's API.

So a new model capable of obsoleting the existing paradigms, being as it
must interoperate, is best implemented as XMPP service software.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/private/gnhlug-discuss/attachments/20090202/e091bc84/attachment.html