XMPP – Brian Roy

People are obsessed with making their email “broadcast”. Push email is a big deal… but sadly it means you have to lock yourself into a single email service from a single provider. You want near real-time push email… Blackberry or Exchange… or you can pretty much forget about it.

So, why can’t we have an open alternative?

There are a multitude of ways to get real time notifications of new emails, and there is no reason for that mechanism to be an integral part of the email solution itself. Given that I set out to make a push email solution for my Google Apps accounts that would effectively notify on my iPhone or any other device.

As it turns out the solution is actually very simple. I created a simple server process that checks my inbox every few seconds and sends me an Instant Message (IM) when I have a new email. I also incorporated sender and subject filters – so you can get notified only for the emails you want.

I could have made it send me a Twitter DM, or an SMS, or plugged it in to PubSubHubBub, or RSS Cloud…

The point is, the actual mechanism for the notification isn’t really all that important…

More after the jump…

Continue reading “Open Push Email” →

2008 was supposed to be the year we began to see real-time web take shape. And while Twitter and FriendFeed have begun to show us some bits of what a real-time web might look like mostly it has been a year of discontent.

While I hate year end/beginning “predictions” (what am I Nostradamus?) I’m predicting 2009 won’t be much better. Why? Well that is the interesting part.

I’ll let you in on a secret (shhh, this is just between you and me). Real-time services on the “web” are nothing new. We have a pretty good idea how they work (and don’t work). We know what the challenges are – and to a large degree how to architect/engineer the solutions. The problem is we aren’t leveraging the work that has already been done.

More after the jump…

Continue reading “Why is the Real-Time Web Community Shooting Itself in the Foot?” →