"We can help generate more customer loyalty, and generate more page views, with our tools," said Michael Jones, the CEO and one of the founders of Userplane. (Meebo is another example of a company that can add chat to Web pages.)
It helps that chat is at the center of a series of interoperability and standards movements, which makes it easier to build more advanced applications for it, as well. Those revolve around software using the protocol called the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol. XMPP is the formalization of the core protocols created by the Jabber open-source community in 1999.
Jeremie Miller developed the original Jabber server back in 1998. Now the project has reached critical mass. Notable is the wide number of different server and client formulations that support XMPP. Jabber.com sells a commercial license, along with a combination of General Public License-based licensed servers and other commercial versions. The project has supported the efforts of dozens of different client implementations. Last year, support reached a new milestone with Google Talk and the Gizmo Project using those protocols.
At the heart of XMPP are the XML document markup standards. Application developers can manipulate their documents as part of chat sessions, such as acting on a particular purchase order or invoice, and have chat sessions produce various kinds of structured documents. "This is the wave of the future, where we are going beyond just plain text chats and doing more structured information management," said Jabber's Saint-Andre.
Complementing the standards efforts is other work to extend basic IM functionality into new areas, including group chats and support for multiple IM identities, along with the ability to interoperate across various private and public networks. Among those with clients or working on clients are Jabber, Microsoft's Live Messenger, Lotus' Sametime, Reuters, Yahoo's Messenger, Apple's iChat AV, and AOL.
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