Preface
Why XMPP?
In 1800, it took one or two years to send a message from London to Calcutta and receive a reply. You needed to find a ship’s captain you trusted, who piloted his sailing ship around the Cape of Good Hope and probably stopped in various ports along the way. Then your contact in Calcutta needed to write a reply and send it back to London in a similar fashion. Not exactly instant messaging!
With the invention of the steamship and the opening of the Suez Canal, the time was reduced to a month or two. Air mail reduced the time further to a week or two, and eventually to a few days (“when it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight”). The deployment of commercial email systems introduced us to wait times of only a few minutes (depending on how often you polled your server). And instant messaging (IM) systems such as ICQ® took communication to its logical conclusion: nearly immediate interaction.
As a result of these developments, the useful half-life of information has shrunk significantly, in many cases to mere seconds. For many people, IM trumps email. Blogging trumps newspapers and magazines. Microblogging trumps blogging. Groupchat trumps email discussion lists. Shared editing and whiteboarding trump carefully crafted presentations. Immediate notifications trump once-a-day updates. And the list goes on.
What all these technologies have in common is that the interactions happen in close to real time. To make this possible, we need technologies for real-time communication. ...
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