twitter and XMPP

A chain of thought I had this morning:

• Twitter is fun and (tentatively) tremendously useful, albeit difficult to explain
• Twitter is a centralized proprietary service, and thus prone to issues of scaling (outages), and privacy.
• Twitter is not magic technology –XMPP and SMS gateways could basically do everything it does now.
• That’s nice and all, but Twitter has the user-base.
• XMPP has a track record of being Really Cool Technology that languishes in obscurity due to its lack of user-friendly implementations and wide user-base adoption.
  • • Google saved XMPP from a similar languishing death in the world of Instant Messaging by adopting this open standard as the basis for Google Talk.
    • Conclusion: Google needs to re-factor Google Talk to be/add a twitter-alike service.</ul> Maybe?