It’s been in the works a long time, but Facebook have finally switched on their XMPP functionality. Suddenly something like 400m users inside the Facebook walled garden are contactable from the outside world. I don’t know if this makes it the largest single deployment of XMPP – Google may be in a position to argue there, although I’ve sometimes been inclined to call their implementation almost-but-not-quite-XMPP.
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Something that’s becoming obvious to me lately is the unintended suitability of a microblog to act as an information hub. To clarify the term microblog here, many may understand that as Twitter, but that would be a bad example because a) it’s both a single public instance of a microblog, and b) it doesn’t have all the capabilities that make this so interesting.
Therefore a good example of what I’m talking about would be a private instance of Laconica running on a local network, or perhaps in a private setup on the public internet. I say private because some of the examples I’m going to give are most appropriate for a private setup.
Etch has ejabberd 1.1 packaged but if you’re like me you’ll want to play with the new features in 2.0, in which case you’ll need to build from source. Etch’s packaged version of Erlang is apparently not up to date enough to support it (it compiles fine, but I couldn’t get TLS to work) so you’ll need to build a newer version of that as well. Luckly it’s all easy. This following is all from your home directory on a fresh install of Debian:
I decided to switch my multi-virtual machine test/dev setup over to a minimal Debian install, not least because I couldn’t keep my mind off the fact that I was carting around a full desktop installation along with various ‘pretty’ desktop backgrounds, system administration for GUI-monkeys applications, and god knows what else. One batch of this stuff is bad enough, but repeated N times it’s too much for me to handle.
For part 3 of this ‘exciting’ series, I’m adding Jabberlang onto the existing setup to provide easy access to two-way XMPP messaging. If I was just sending, I would have restricted myself to tinkering with the code that Sam Ruby kindly piped up with the other day.
Following on my previous post, the next stage is to add an XMPP server to the setup, in the form of ejabberd. As before, all the commands given are executing from our home directory, and in every case ubuntu01 should be substituted with the hostname (fully qualified) of the machine.
I’m testing an interesting service called IMified at the moment. It’s basically an Instant Messaging bot that provides access to various functionality by sending and receiving messages via your usual client. It works on all the major networks, although I’m only really interested in XMPP (Jabber).
IMified provides a framework where new ‘Widgets’ (essentially bot applications) can be plugged in. There are a range of Widgets already available, covering things such as reminders and todo lists, as well as support for blog posting to a range of different platforms such as Wordpress and Livejournal (which I used to post this message).
