Alec Saunders SquawkBox

The biggest story to hit the telecom world in a while, in my opinion, is Facebook’s decision to go XMPP with their chat client. I think it means a ton for SIP/Simple, for developers and the IM Gulag perpetuated by Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL. So we talked about it on the SquawkBox. Some conclusions:

Given the sheer number of Facebook users in the market, and the failure of Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL to open up their clouds to SIMPLE, is this the nail in the coffin for SIMPLE? Answer: Probably.

With popular XMPP clients like Does XMPP beat the big MSFT YHOO AOL at the IM game over the long term? Answer: maybe.

A lot of us thought that a presence cloud would be part of the telecom infrastructure. Now it looks as if it might live outside the infrastructure. Answer: Probably.

We also talked about the rumoured TouchScreen BlackBerry that has surfaced on the Boy Genius Report. Reportedly it will be a Verizon exclusive. Seems like a smart move on RIM’s part — a counter to Apple’s iPhone Mo.

On the call: Jeb Brilliant, Andy Abramson, Jim Courtney, James Body, Brad Jones, Jeanette Fisher, Ian Hood, Bill Volk, Tom Howe and Todd Spraggins.

 

 Squawk Box May 14 [28:12m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

It’s popular to talk about how VoIP means the “death of distance”.  Because IP flattens networks, Voice on IP rides “distance unaware” to basically any place on the planet.  Flat Planet Phone Company CEO Moshe Maeir knows this better than anyone, having just sold a call center to the UAW in support of the US Democratic Party… from his home base in Israel.  VoIP extensions were used to connect folks in Indiana back to their headquarters in NY.

Nicely done Moshe!

Those cagey guys at Facebook are about to do something which nobody else in the last five years has been able to do.  They’re about to crown Jabber/XMPP the king of IM protocols, and in the process they may finally crack the hegemony that AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo have enjoyed in the IM market for the last decade.

The news is that Facebook has announced that Facebook Chat will become XMPP compliant.  In theory that means you can take a client like iChat on the Mac, or GTalk from Google and make it speak to Facebook chat.  And Facebook is where the eyeballs are moving to today.

Example: as I write this at 5:30 AM, I have 30 contacts online on Skype, 29 on Facebook, 6 on MSN, and 2 on GTalk.  GTalk, for all its promise, is little more than a persistent twitter window for me.  I started on MSN, but for a long time, Skype has been my primary IM. Skype is where the people are.  Increasingly, Facebook is becoming a Skype replacement for text chat.

To place all of this in context: Skype, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL are proprietary closed IM protocols.  There has been a tug of war for some time in the industry between two open standards — XMPP and SIP/SIMPLE.  Neither has won out, despite the fact that the telecom industry understands that presence is a huge step forward.  With Facebook’s endorsement of XMPP, however, that could all change.  Their 70 million plus audience is about to become completely presence enabled in a standard way, paving the way for a true social directory for all communications networks.

And, as I wrote 18 months ago in New Presence, this is happening off network.   To be valuable, a presence cloud needs to be open and exist separate from the carriers.

Users live lives outside the artificially constructed walled gardens of the network operators, and so must their presence.  Therefore, New Presence assumes a user-centric model of presence rather than a network-centric model. New Presence by its nature must be an off-carrier platform as it is dependent on the ability of users to assert identity, catalog relationships, and gather contextual information across multiple networks.