FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Internet2 Focuses Instant Messaging Research on XMPP
Consortium of More Than 200 Universities and Corporations Forms Working Group to Consider Using XMPP as National and International Standard For Federated Instant Messaging
Denver, CO - September 29, 2003 - The Jabber Software Foundation (JSF), the non-profit organization that builds open application protocols on top of the IETF's Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP), today confirmed that Internet2's I2IM working group is focusing its efforts on XMPP. As described on the I2IM web site (<http://middleware.internet2.edu/i2im>), XMPP "has benefited from an open process, open-source implementations, and, recently, IETF-led protocol standardization."
XMPP is the XML protocol for instant messaging that grew out of the Jabber open-source project and that is now in Last Call within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). XMPP has been widely considered the lingua franca of instant messaging, used as a protocol for connecting open source and proprietary IM applications.
I2IM, also known as the Integrated Infrastructure for Instant Messaging Working Group, reports that "services like IRC and AOL Instant Messenger have been widely used by university people for university-related work, raising issues of authentication, authorization, privacy, and legal compliance. As IM becomes an increasingly popular alternative to email, users look to campus IT services for the same level of support and integration traditionally provided for central email services."
"Jabber and XMPP have had significant presence within academic circles for years," said Peter Saint-Andre, executive director of the JSF. "Through I2IM, we are working to make XMPP the federated standard for IM and perhaps other middleware functions across the academic landscape, centralizing IM communication on individual campuses and securely enabling them between different institutions."
About the XMPP Standards Foundation
The XMPP Standards Foundation (XSF) builds open protocols for presence, instant messaging, and real-time communication and collaboration on top of the IETF's Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP), and also provides information and infrastructure to the worldwide community of Jabber/XMPP developers, service providers, and end users. Widely considered the lingua franca of instant messaging, XMPP is an Internet standard for presence, real-time messaging, and streaming Extensible Markup Language (XML) data that grew out of the popular Jabber open-source technologies first released in 1999. With approval of XMPP by the IETF in 2004, the XSF continues to develop XMPP extensions that meet the needs of its many stakeholders: open-source and commercial developers (including Apple, HP, Nokia, and Sun), organizations large and small (including the U.S. defense establishment and most Wall Street investment banks), Internet and mobile service providers (including Google, NTT, Portugal Telecom, Twitter, and Facebook), and an estimated 50+ million end users worldwide.
For further information, visit <http://www.xmpp.org/> or contact XSF Executive Director Peter Saint-Andre.