Anders Conbere Application 2008

History
I started working with XMPP about 2 years ago now with a couple of small applications involving the use of the network of users and their relations stored in XMPP rosters as the foundations of a globally distributed social network.

Since that time I've been writing about XMPP at my blog, involved in the mailing list at social@xmpp.org as well as a vocal proponent of communities like Data Portability arguing for the case of using XMPP to distribute social network data, and working with members of many other projects to talk about how we can use XMPP to help us build better tools.

[XMPP-PSN]
This is a little prototype project for an idea on how to translate between http requests and xmpp stanzas by way of an http proxy.

[SleekXMPP]
I've made a couple patches to the code base of sleekxmpp and have been working with Nathan Fritz to expand it's XEP coverage.

[OpenID module for eJabberD]
This is also in the very early stages, you can see the results here http://conbere.org:5280/openid/ it's basically an eJabberD http module that allows you to check the credentials of a user. Eventually I hope to complete the full OpenID workflow.

Future Goals
I'd like to begin to see more tools created to help the people making new social networks be able to leverage the tools provided by XMPP in a way that enriches the XMPP community. This is including but not limited to OpenID support in jabber servers, oAuth support to retrieving a jabber roster, exporting jabber rosters as FOAF files, and at least talk beginning about how XMPP can begin to interact more efficiently with what already exists on the web.

Why I'm here
I think that realtime communication is a huge problem for many many developers, and that XMPP fulfills many of their needs. I think when attempting to reasonably describe human relations, the descriptor needs to be able to be updated real time (and that means having a singular look up location) and XMPP meets that problem. I've dealt with the problems of aggregation, polling and the traffic that creates and I think PubSub and a push model begins to meet those problems. And I think more and more we want to have rich internet experiences on our desktops (either via widgets, gadgets, programs like twitterific or even games) and that XMPP again fulfills a unique niche there.

In short I consistently find myself looking for solutions to problems I'm faced with, and finding that XMPP provides answers, and yet, I also often find that the solutions that XMPP provides don't meet all my needs, or aren't quite at a point where I could recommend them to my clients. I want to see these problems be solved, and I think XMPP is the closest thing we have for many of them, and I want to see the solutions exist and be widely deployed in a way that it enriches the XMPP experience for it's users.