[JDEV] Jabber Killer App: WCS?

[David 'TheRaven' Chisnall]

In my opinion Jabber is the idea mechanism for intelligent agents to use 
to communicate with their owners.  It would be particularly nice to have 
an RSS agent which could send me all of the items from a particular site 
(or collection of sites) and then build up a profile of which articles I 
read.  After a while it could, in addition to a daily summary of all of 
the sites I've subscribed to, send me instant allerts when something it 
thinks I would be interrested in occurs.  Most of the functionality it 
requires is already in the protocol, it just needs a client that can 
inform a service when a particular link in a headline message has been 
visited, or possibly the service could just mark links that have been 
replied to (same message id in headline and reply) as interresting to 
the particular user.  Anyway, I'm thinking out loud here.  The web is 
getting to the point where it is not easy to filter all of the 
information that a user may wish to read sensibly using a conventional 
browser interface, and a Jabber client could be a far better interface 
for the future.

On the subject of Jabber Vs MSN, I recently asked an MSN-user friend why 
he hadn't switched, and the answer surprised me.  He said Jabber was too 
complicated.  It seems that MSN only implements a handful of the 
features of Jabber, but these are the ones the people actually use (not 
that they have any real choice if they are MSN users...).  Food for thought.

Bart van Bragt wrote:

> 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
>
>
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