Meebo invented everything for us in 2007(?!)

If there would exists a "Jabber Innovation Award 2007" I would definitely give it to Silicon Valley-based Meebo. Their platform, built on top of libgaim and jabber, offers the following things currently:

• Online Presence / chat widget embeddable at webpages


• Web interface and desktop client support for jabber (your account is user@meebo.org)


• Ad-hoc groupchat functions accessible from any network (through web interface) - most possibly based on MUC


• Embeddable groupchat (MUC) for webpages


• Media-recognition (youtube links are added to a media pool in a groupchat)


• Web-based filesending abilities, even for groupchat


• Platform-independent web-based plugin capabilities, including:


• Voice and videochat support with any users on any network

Pretty awesome list, isn't it?

I recommend to try it for yourself, as I said above, registering a meebo user means effectively having a jabber address - using other systems happen through gaim.

While we're trying to push out new XEPs, they realized two things:

• Web is the platform you should build on, because it's independent from nearly everything, yet quite popular


• If you have a disadvantage (being a browser-based client it isn't fashionable for geeks) you better start to innovate.


• Even if you're based on jabber, you should make sure protocol does not matter: it's the client which does the user experience

If we could only ask them, how they achieved this, and how we could make this a common knowledge of humanity and ourselves!

(The author still dreams of having an open meebo platform-like solution for desktop clients too through standardizing and WebKit/Gecko/CHtmlView)

XMPP services as OpenSocial providers?

I'm just looking at the freshly-out OpenSocial API by Google, and a few others. While there's a lot of rationale behind how and why the Facebook platform works as we know it today, I understand such a system would be hard to use generally for a lot of social network providers, therefore the OpenSocial API is much simpler.

Looking at the API, it feels to me it perfectly fits some usual PEP-PIP-POP, (generally P.?P:) scenarios, and since some of the major XMPP server vendors contain a built-in webserver already, it shouldn't be hard to do as a module for them.

What would be the benefit of providing such API? Building systems on top of XMPP allows us to deploy services in the social web scene, which did not get jabber yet as much as it could be.