XMPP and Social Computing: Let the Bots Talk

http://www.internetdagarna.se/track/media/social-computing-or-let-the-bots-talk

by fogus • 17 years ago

18 15 17 years ago

axod6• 17 years ago

PLEASE Let us do all this with something other than XMPP. Have we not learnt by now that the claim of ultimate 'extensibility'!!! Is stupidity.

Most buzz words starting with 'X' from the 90s early 00s should be firmly laid to rest as terrible ideas built on more terrible ideas.

riffic4• 17 years ago

Do you have any specific faults with xmpp or is this rant based purely on speculation?

jerf2• 17 years ago

I've worked a lot with XMPP in a professional capacity and I have no idea what his complaint on that front it. It's trivially extensible; if you control both ends of the connection, grab a namespace and go to town. If you don't, you have to coordinate on the protocol, but XMPP won't get in your way. You can't do that with any other IM protocol that I know. (Which isn't all of them, but I do know a lot about a lot of them.)

There are other criticisms that make more sense, mostly to do with the annoyance of dealing with XML (especially for people that don't actually understand it; there's a bit more than meets the eye and XMPP actually uses thing like namespaces) and some valid complaints about verbosity (which mostly only matters in a mobile context), but there's a lot of other "standard" criticism that come more from ignorance than understanding, the biggest one being "complexity"; XMPP is modular, and if you just want to pop open a connection and send a message that's hardly a day's worth of coding starting from nothing more than a socket and an XML parser. If you don't want to be in a conference room, you don't have to worry about the conferencing standard, and so on.

There pretty much isn't another IM protocol that's even in the running for this sort of use, because XMPP is the only one that actually is extensible. The only alternative is specifying a protocol from scratch, and of course that hypothetical protocol is perfect and awesome... what with it not existing. Of course XMPP can't compete with the perfect protocols that exist only in people's imaginations (and note the plural... no two of them are the same). But XMPP actually exists, now.

axod6• 17 years ago

Yes I've written most of an XMPP client from scratch. It's a disgusting wart of a protocol over engineered by insane people.

My previous comment on the matter: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=426581

Extensibility is really trivial. Human readable is trivial. Protocols based on XML solve neither of these well at all IMHO.

If XMPP ever did take off, we'd see a large increase in bandwidth usage everywhere. No doubt though they'd then just wrap it all up in another layer of complex compression to compensate for a ridiculous protocol.

dmix• 17 years ago

This article is a "social media consultants" wet dream:

"Lay a foundation for a much more general computing and distribution infrastructure for context-aware, social-spreadable and trusted application scenarios that potentially enable users to regain control over their own graph of information and control access to it using social connections."

Now, back to reality...

peterneubauer1• 17 years ago

Hi there, being the author of this article, let me just point out that I am _not_ an "social media consultant" but part of the scientific research carried out at www.linkedprocess.org. This article is merely trying to summarize and relate different computing approaches like Chat, GWave and others. Much of what is pointed out in this article is already either in the XEP (which is, others are actually extending the protocol and requesting these extensions to be standardized) or projects are exploring these scenarios (see the links in the comments and the article itself).

So, I don't think this is reality distortion, Google Wave and others placing their "next generation conversation" bets into this basket is IMHO a very fundamental endorsement.

XMPP is not the tightest of protocols, but it adds a lot of value in the outlined scenarios since you get internet-scale discovery, status handling, routing infrastructure and handling of extensions and custom payloads for free.

The XML overhead is IMHO only evident if you are either very low on bandwith (like mobile networks before flat rate and 3G) or parsing the XML yourself (not using the excellent client libs out there), so I think that is acceptable. I agree with some of the other comments that there never will be an ideal protocol, but this actually works, has exisitng deployments, clients and libs, and there are open servers and specifications to roll your own if you like.

See the piece as a summary, not a roadmap.

Cheers

/peter

extension• 17 years ago

It took a minute to wrap my head around it, but this thing has really got me thinking: http://www.linkedprocess.org/

Summary: XMPP extension protocol to create remote VMs and inject code into them, language agnostic, asynchronous (you can leave the job running).

Until now, when I heard "distributed computing", I thought of number crunching, protein folding, etc. which doesn't excite me.

But think of it this way: with a ubiquitous system like this, you are effectively decoupling applications from resources. Instead of inventing formats to serialize data, or protocols to transfer it around, or RPC schemes to provide remote services, you just make everything available locally in a sandboxed VM. Consumers inject code to assemble and transfer just the data they need, when they need it, with the power to deal with whatever constraints the network places on their particular use case.

Creating local APIs, in practice, is vastly easier than creating network protocols, especially when it comes to cooperation and standards. So... move the cooperation boundary to the easy part of the pipeline.

XMPP and Social Computing: Let the Bots Talk

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