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Gnip Dropping XMPP, Closes New Funding

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.

Dopplr Raises A Second Angel Round

Dopplr has announced raising an additional round of financing to help fuel growth in the social travel service. It's an undisclosed amount, and all from angels:

Dopplr Blog.

The new investors include Esther Dyson, Tyler Brûlé, Thomas Glocer, Yat Siu, Aditya dev Sood, Lars Hinrichs, Joshua Schachter, Brian Behlendorf, Ami Hasan, Daniel Sachs, Joshua Cooper Ramo, Kim Weckström, and Azeem Azhar. Saul Klein, who invested in this round, also invested in the previous round together with Martin Varsavsky, Reid Hoffman and Joichi Ito.

An extremely well-connected group.

Friendster: New Money Following Bad?

Has anyone ever climbed back from a plunge like the Friendster nosedive? I don't think so. But big money thinks so, with IDG Ventures, Kleiner Perkins and Benchmark throwing $20M into the kitty.

[from Friendster Lives: New Cash, New Boss and a New Strategy? - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog by Brad Stone]

It says it has more than 75 million users, though many who signed up in the early days have not used it for some time. It also says it is the top social network in Asia, with 33 million monthly unique visitors from the region -– twice the amount any other social network.

Beyond expanding in Asia, one clue to Friendster’s future plans may be found in its description of itself in this latest press release. Friendster “has a growing portfolio of patents granted to the company on social networking, with more expected over the next several months.”

Perhaps they can capitalize on 33M Asian visitors a month, but I don't see them reemerging here because of that.

And the patent thing? Aren't we expecting that a lot of software patents might be unenforceable based on the new tack at the Patent and Trademark Office? Or maybe the VCs didn't hear about that.

Paul Kedrosky: VC Is Broken

[from Pessimism From Venture Capitalists - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog]

Self-serving protestations to the contrary aside, there is no institutional venture market without regular and sizable IPO exits. With 10-year venture returns set to soon lag long term S&P returns, this is an asset class in a serious state of brokenness.