We'll Be Waiting A Long Time For Twitter IM

October 11, 2008

The Twitter team has finally stopped hemming and hawing about Twitter’s defunct XMPP support; it is not coming soon. This is both good and bad news.

It is bad news because Twitter’s IM interface provided needed motivation for many users to get an XMPP account or start using their already existing XMPP account more. Many users who love Twitter will be waiting a long time before their pet feature makes a come back.

it is good news for the open microblogging movement. All the current open microblogging sites fully support an XMPP interface, and people are now starting to refine these and build new stuff on top. Seesmic’s Twhirl client uses XMPP to get faster updates, and Laconica recently got command parsing features in the XMPP interface.

I continue to believe that XMPP will be crucial for open microblogging and in the communications space in general because real time data is different.

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