A Glimpse Into the Future if XMPP and Wave are Successful

The XMPP protocol is now more than a decade old and provides rich presence and multimedia communication functions, along with personal event subscription and presence, all built on a Web-friendly platform that integrates beautifully with HTTP, email, and SPARQL. It's become the engine for many modern instant messaging platforms but hasn't seen much use outside of that sphere--yet. In mid-2009 Google released Wave to a limited audience. Wave is part Web client and part extension to the XMPP protocol. It could very well be the catalyst that is needed to push XMPP over the edge into mainstream use. The Wave protocol fills functional holes in XMPP, providing extensions that offer federation, real-time content updates and synchronization, and define a conversation's structure. 

In short, everything that's needed to build a powerful, distributed social communication network. It also has Google to market it. 

If successful, XMPP and Wave will have profound and lasting effects on our daily lives online. They will enable people to have a single point of contact, single sign-on, online presence, and a truly unified communication endpoint hosted at a personal virtual server. This will drastically undercut the role of today's social networks, relegating them to the role of unneeded middle-men and proprietary interfaces on top of a global and open social network. This opens up exciting new possibilities. Managing multiple devices will be easy as your online presence itself will be aware of which endpoint you'd prefer to use at any given time and be capable of text, audio, and video communication, responding differently depending on who is contacting you. Personal bots that live on your personal virtual sever will help you communicate and function even when offline, obeying your rules no matter what time it is. Conversation content and context stored in Waves can be marked up and exposed for search, allowing for richer context as the client tools mature. You will be able to publish your data to your virtual server for discovery and exploration using Linked Data (Semantic Web) technology, which will finally allow you to use your social graph as a true data source. All sorts of fascinating new uses will emerge as the true potential of this technology is absorbed and exploited by the market. 2010 promises to be an exciting year as Wave is rolled out and we begin to see new clients emerge--both for Wave and XMPP--and we catch a glimpse of what the next generation of communication looks like.