XMPP At The SF Music Tech Summit

October 21, 2008

I had a great day at the San Francisco Music Tech Summit and I was only a little surprised by the large amount of interest in XMPP. Here’s a few things I noticed:

• At least two different companies told me they were looking to hire someone to do XMPP work, and were definitely feeling like there weren’t enough XMPP hackers. More proof that XMPP hackers are in demand.
• Over half the room during the data feeds panel I moderated said they were interested in XMPP. Many of them were all over Eric Marcoullier from Gnip afterwards asking about their XMPP feeds.
• Many complained about the current XMPP server implementations. Openfire and ejabberd got the most complaints. It’s clear that the implementations are getting a bad rap, especially pubsub implementations. It’s clear that many are having trouble, but not so clear what the specific trouble is.
• More than one person gave me positive feedback on the idea of EC2 images for ejabberd.

Remember, this is a music technology conference, not an open source conference. These people are trying to solve problems they face in creating new technologies for the music industry, music creators, and music fans, and they are looking to XMPP to provide some solutions. It’s amazing to see XMPP finally getting this kind of well-deserved attention.

On another note, I am always happy to see new folks embracing open multimedia codecs. Bandcamp is a new startup helping bands sell music, and Vorbis and Flac are fully supported there. XMPP seems to be getting its day in the sun, and I hope that the Xiph.org Foundation’s efforts will see similar interest some day.

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