Talking Social Networks

Social Networking services are opening up and one of the models is federation. No longer should you have to sign up with another (similar) service to share pictures, bookmarks, microblog entries, what you’re currently listening to, etc. with your friends and contacts who happen to feel more at home there than at your preferred service. Also, third party applications (both on the desktop as well as on other web sites) have seen a major uptake.

Proposals for protocols to do all the above, have mostly focussed on HTTP as the (only) transport protocol. This has resulted in specifications like OpenID and OAuth to do authentication and authorization and various ways to work around the inherent polling nature of HTTP. Jabber/XMPP however could compliment HTTP by offering its built in authentication, secrecy and integrity features, while providing a low-latency, bidirectional messaging platform.

This session will show how to use already existing Jabber/XMPP technologies to exchange (events on) social objects, contacts, and presence between services. On the client side, we look into using Jabber/XMPP as an API. All this blending into the native Jabber IM capabilities. Examples include transporting Atom representations of social objects using XMPP’s publish-subscribe extension protocol, getting notifications when they change, and maintaining your contact list. Other topics include auto-discovery and using XMPP through HTTP (e.g. for small scale services).