Wow. I was surprised to hear that Gnip, the ping server startup, is dropping support for XMPP, and I was equally surprised to here the rationale
[from Gnip: We got $h*t to pop » Winding down XMPP, for now]... our take is that it’s a good model / protocol, with too many scattered implementations which is leaving it in the “immature” bucket. Apache wound up setting the HTTP standard, and an XMPP server equivalent hasn’t taken hold in the marketplace.
From Gnip’s perspective, XMPP is causing us pain and eating cycles. More than half of all customer service requests are about XMPP and in many cases, the receiving party isn’t standing up their own server. They’re running off of Google or Jabber.org and there’s not much we can do when they get throttled. As a result, we’ve decided that we should eliminate XMPP (both in/out bound) as soon as possible. Outbound will be shut off with our next code push on Wednesday; we’ll cut inbound when Twitter finds another way to push to us.
The immaturity of XMPP -- which means a wide variance in implementations -- and the lack of a canonical open source XMPP server means that Gnip was drowning in support calls for XMPP implementations.
Like Marshall Kirkpatrick, I thought that XMPP support was central to the Gnip architecture and value proposition, but I guess not. Basic Restful push is going to be the mainstay, I guess.
Update: Later the same day, Gnip has announced that they have raised an additional $3.5M in funding.
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