Despite what TechCrunch may have said about Blaine Cook, his talk today on Real Time Web wasn’t delivered from under a rock.
He talked with the Web 2.0 expo crowd about how HTTP refreshing isn’t the right protocol for applications that use messaging, such as Twitter. His take is that the best messaging service out there, one that is open, free, web ready, standards based, easy to use, all these thing in one is the Jabber protocol
Jabber’s event driven messaging means that a service like twitter doesn’t have to constantly poll on status of customers when usually the result is ‘nothing new’ Event driven messaging like Jabber allows the service to ‘ping’ the Twitter service to say ‘hey, Im back’ or ‘Hey, I have a message’ Following this on, this means that the Twitter service to then send on that message to you, the subscriber once and only once when its fresh. Jabber is Client-Server not p2p, which is applicable here.
The use of jabber in Twitter makes perfect sense. What you can learn from Blaine’s experience is still a bit muddy, however. Twitter has known scalability issues, but how much of those were HTTP/Jabber problems? We just don’t know. The reality is that for the B2B business, you will likely never face their kind of subscription traffic issues. That means that Jabber should be looked at for the right projects that needs Presence, Subscription, and Messaging. It is XML and looks very much like email in its design. Look at Jabber as a choice for your Web Messaging needs.
Oh, he also laid the gauntlet by saying RSS is good for basic content subscription, but APIs should use ATOM due to parsing being cleaner. Evangelists are still liking RSS, so this was an interesting reveal.
Technorati Tags: web2expo, real time web, B2B