[JDEV] Jabber Killer App: WCS?

[Bart van Bragt]

What is, or will be, the Jabber killer application? The one thing that 
sets Jabber appart from the rest, the application that makes people want 
to switch to Jabber?

At the moment the most important reason to switch to Jabber is the fact 
that it's open, but is that enough for Joe Average User? I don't think 
so. Joe is happy with his MSNM with the nice smileys, the MSNM that he 
didn't even had to install and the MSNM that he already had a (hotmail) 
account for :D

Being open, distributed, XML-based, easy to develop for, etc, are really 
nice properties of Jabber/XMPP but they are of (close to) zero interest 
for the average Internet user out there. So IMO we really need some 
thinks that make people want to switch and leave their old IM system behind.

Videoconferencing, voice communication, playing games while chatting, 
these have all been done already. IMO there we need to do something more 
fundamental which is: Web integration :D I think that this is an area 
where we are already ahead of the pack with the XML based distributed 
network.

Besides Email the web is one of the most important components of the 
Internet, everyone uses it almost constantly when they are on the Net. 
So I think there are some really nice opportunities there. Wouldn't it 
be nice to instantly be able to chat with other visitors on a site about 
knitting? Wouldn't it be great if you would receive a message if 
something changes on the newssite you normally check 10 times a day? 
Wouldn't it be great if you could add entries to you weblog simply by 
talking to a bot on your roster? I'm sure we can come up with even more 
(and even more interesting) applications for this.

At the moment I'm trying to figure out how we can really integrate phpBB 
with Jabber. Sure, people can send a Jabber message to phpBB users with 
a Jabber account now, or view their vCard. These are nice but very 
trivial features. It would be a LOT more interesting if phpBB could send 
you an IM when you get a new private message on a board. It would be 
even greater if you could reply to that IM just like you would to the 
private message. But at the moment it's quite a disaster to implement a 
system like that. Yeah, it's a fairly easy thing to do when you have 
your own webserver. But how many website owners own the server that 
their sites runs on? How many are allowed to run bots/services? Not that 
many :D

So this is where WCS (http://oid.jabber.org/?oid=1102) comes in. A 
component that sends/receives HTTP requests. It's a LOT easier for a 
webmaster to just put a script on the site that receives Jabber messages 
than to have a bot running that's constantly connected to the Jabber 
network.

The only problem is that the WCS project has been dead for 2 years. IMO 
we really need to revive it. It looks like there have been quite a few 
people in the past that have improved/debugged WCS but as far as I can 
tell those patches never reached Jeremie. I think it would be a very 
good idea if we could make WCS a truely usable component that would 
significantly ease Web integration. This would give Jabber quite a head 
start. For example, I'm running a community site with 8000 computer 
nitwits, if I could properly integrate that site with Jabber it would be 
quite trivial for me to convert a very large part of them to Jabber. It 
would ease their communication with both the site and the rest of the 
community. This would be even easier if there was a free version of 
Trillian which has Jabber support :D

Hmm, this became a pretty long post. Sorry for that :)
The bottomline: Who would like to help with the WCS project? Or, even 
better, who would like to run it? My knowledge of C is just too minimal 
and I also already committed myself to both phpBB.com and the 
jabbercentral.org site :D

With kind regards,

Bart