As a follow up to my post t’other day, there is news today that the Jabber Council (of Elders ) decided to publish the two Google-inspired voice-over-IP protocols as JEPs. This is good news. Right now, VOIP is extremely bifuricated (good word). Not just in the Jabber space but we’re talking the whole concept. There are some front runners like SIP and IAX, then a mish-mash of uninteroperable stuff like Skype, MSN, and Yahoo. Now when I say uninteroperable, I mean something that does not meet these criteria:

• Uses open standards-based protocols
• Accessible hardware reference designs when you are talking about things like PSTN interfacing
• Free to implement (i.e. no royalties or restricted federation agreements)
• Cross-platform; at least the client(s) and preferrably the server(s) too.
• I personally don’t mind if something is not opensource, but I know the rabid GNU‘ers out there will add that as a requirement.

But even inside XMPP , the most bestest interoperable messaging system available, there are a few uninteroperable VOIP implementations! Best examples of this would be iChat, Tipic and GTalk. Apple could have worked to make their VOIP stuff a Jabber standard and maybe through some evangelism programs help some of the open source clients. They are big enough that their weight would have lent weight to the XMPP/VOIP movement. Didn’t happen. I respect Tipic, they’ve been around a while. But they would have to expend a lot of time and money to turn what they have done into wider usage, and that hasn’t happened.

So that leaves Google. There are some smart cookies over there. They looked at the IM landscape and decided there was promise. They looked at the various business models and partnership possibilities and decided that the IM networks were pretty much dominated by their competitors. Partnership here wouldn’t make a lot of sense, especially since MSN, AOL and Yahoo couldnt get along together before Google jumped in the ring.

The obvious choice is to think wider, think stuff like “why is SMTP ubiquitous?”. When you think like that, the obvious answer is to go with XMPP for instant messaging. Or SIMPLE, but that’s not as good, and of course one of Google’s competitors has its large hands in that. I bet that was not an easy decision to make though. SIP has big VOIP inroads.

Ok, skip forward to today. Google had voice (and likely video) as a part of their plan from day one I’m sure. Text is the core component but they know voice and video are key pieces for the future of IM. The nice guys that they are, Brin and wosshisname, they are taking the future dominant player in IM–XMPP–and bringing that future a little closer.

They made GTalk. That really helped give Jabber some mindshare. Then they started working within our processes to make VOIP a standardized part of Jabber-something that has been an obvious lack for some time.

I’m not sure how this will pan out, (well I do know some things I won’t share) but it is quite exciting. Will Google’s work help make VOIP commonplace? Is video on the way? What about groupchat (MUC) integration, encryption, and maybe alternate media streams such as…I dunno, XMPP < -> 3GP video < -> mobile communication networks?

Neat stuff.

(I apologize if I’m rambling. I’m writing this while in a training class and I am at least pretending to pay attention to it. Hopefully this post made some sense.)