I’m in an excellent mood today. You probably don’t care, but you might care about an upcoming Jabber XCP enhancement that will make it easier for users to publish updates about their mood, location, what music they are listening to, etc.

XMPP is enhanced and extended through a standards process around XMPP Extension Protocols (XEPs). Jabber, Inc., has a long history of participation in the standards process (back to the days when XEPs were called JEPs) and through the years, support for many XEPs have been added to Jabber XCP, Jabber’s flagship XMPP server.

Our developers are at it again, adding support to Jabber XCP for XEP-0163: Personal Eventing via Pubsub, which should be of interest to anyone following the evolution and use of presence technology. XEP-0163 lets users send updates about anything to users on their rosters. Personal eventing lets people easily publish things about themselves - it doesn’t get any more user-centric than this! The updates are sent using the XMPP Publish-Subscribe functionality used in Jabber XCP’s InfoBroker and described in XEP-0060. One way to look at it is that XEP-0163 takes XEP-0060 functionality to a more personal level.

I was skeptical when we first started talking about adding this enhancement. The use cases in the XEP include sending updates on your current mood and what music you are listening to. I immediately understood the value of personal geolocation, a classical extended presence element, but mood? Why should Jabber’s customers at leading service providers, enterprises and government agencies care about such personal and subjective elements?

But then I had an epiphany: Presence is intrinsically personal and becomes more valuable as more details are added. Plus, personal subjective thoughts and feelings have major impacts on our world. Mood (sometimes veiled in more scientific words such as “sentiment” or “perception”) can determine the outcome of elections, move capital markets and have a major impact on the success of corporate, military and organizational initiatives. Things get really interesting when the extended presence details of many individuals are aggregated and analyzed. You probably don’t care what mood I’m in, but wouldn’t it be interesting to see the aggregated mood of everyone in your company or organization? How about the aggregated, real-time sentiment of voters, soldiers, traders or everyone in an online community, particularly if the information is up-to-date, accurate and made anonymous at the individual level?

The success of Twitter (which has XMPP in its architecture, BTW) and other similar services proves that personal eventing (in addition to presence, in general) is valued in social network settings. Service providers should be interested in the increased stickiness that personal eventing brings to their communities. Once users get used to seeing their friends’ moods, blog posts, activities, etc. they are more likely to stay in the communities which publish these details. The extension of social network technology to enterprise applications is in full swing, so by adding support for Personal Eventing via Pubsub to Jabber XCP, our extensible and highly scalable real-time presence and messaging platform will take the Power of Presence to a more personal and valuable level. The customers we’ve talked to about PEP have some great use cases and they will use this new functionality in their deployments. How about you?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 29, 2008 at January 29, 2008 and is filed under Jabber, Inc., Presence, XMPP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.