You get a short amount of words to explain your current situation. Tell people where you are, tell them how you feel and why it matters.

See, all that, and I still had five characters left over, too. Why is this important, and how is it changing the Internet?   Okay, so here goes: These tiny blurbs are streaming across the ‘Net on web sites, phone applications (SMSs on older cell phones), and even on giant LCDs in Times Square and downtown Tokyo.  The blurbs, micro-objects really, are not intrusive, because you have to subscribe to a user to see their posts in your stream.  But if you want to see the entire flood of messages on a system like Identi.ca, you need only go to the home page and watch it flow past you. (Like this stream on Rejaw: http://rejaw.com/everyone or this one at Jaiku: http://jaiku.com/explore)

The majority of these micro-blogging systems are built to utilize the XMPP standard, which has been around since 1998 when the Jabber project hatched it.  XMPP stands for Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, which is an open, XML-like protocol, that is a decentralized alternative to the centralized, corporate-owned, anachronistic instant messaging systems like AOL and MSN.  While I have nothing against corporate-owned systems per se, I am all for the decentralized platforms that take advantage of the cloud structure that the Internet is rapidly adopting.  From the open source Laconica server, which is written in the open source PHP language, to the Linux, Apache, Python, and MySQL-driven code of Pownce – open is good.  Nyet?

This cloud-like structure is amazing for a lot of reasons, but we need to focus on something that is maybe only a few months away.  Imagine your workday when your gadgets, calendars, emails, co-workers and even your car can send you XMPP messages when needed.  For these short, to the point messages, you wouldn’t dirty your email inbox; but rather they would flow into your XMPP stream as needed.  An impromptu meeting is taking place and your CTO needs you… chirp.  Your iPhone battery is complaining because you forgot to charge it last night when you collapsed in the hotel room… chirp.  Even better, your Gmail account sends you a message that it is getting close to being low on disk space… chirp.  Tivo wants you to know that the original Planet of the Apes is on tonight, chirp.  Ooh, I love this one, your refrigerator sends you a message like this one: If U want ur cereal in the AM, U betr get some milk!

If we look at XMPP like this, then we can see that there are countless uses for micro-messages.  In the corporate enterprise environment, I would like to see more integration between our CRM and ERP tools, an XMPP application could easily facilitate this for us.  A work flow would instantiate itself when a predefined criteria was met on the CRM side.  Perhaps a marketing campaign has just terminated itself and now we can evaluate the ROI.  So, the CRM dips into the back office data to scour all sales for the period the campaign was valid.  The CRM finds all coupons redeemed, slices those down to the coupons of interest for this particular campaign, runs the sales and gross margins, as well as what we might have lost for the shipping we gave away.  Once all of this is complete the CRM sends a micro-message to the ERP system.  The ERP system takes these numbers and updates the Manufacturing system, as well as the Supply Chain Management system. A predefined plan executes to spin up production on the items which sold best in the last campaign. Neat, huh?

It sounds like there is a lot of work to do, and there is, but this is a great time to be in the trenches.  So many possibilities, so many tools, and so many problems that we might be able to solve with technology — where before we have been using disparate systems, brute force, and the Sneakernet.

Links:

• Identi.ca
• Jaiku (Google owns this service)
• Laconica
• Pownce
• Rejaw
• Twitter
• XMPP server platforms
• MarkMail search on XMPP

Matt
matt (at) technologystory.com

p.s. I didn’t even get into the rich-media side of micro-messages in this article.  Sites like 12seconds.tv are pushing this faster and faster still.