So apparently I'm stuck in the middle of trying to figure out where things are going with chat. Isn't chatting the funnest thing you've ever done? Why does it have to be so darn complicated in the end? I just want to be able to talk to everyone else and them to be able to talk to me.
IRC - or better known as Internet Relay Chat. A not so new protocol, dating back to 1988; wow the internet was hardly even called internet at that time! Go ARPANet. Still going strong of course, as per the link. It can support point to point, group discussions, permanent chat rooms, as well as file sharing/data transfer. Most people remember this protocol being used by a client called mIRC. Of course there are a lot of holes in this software, and potentially has security issues if not well implemented.
XMPP - or better known as Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol. Dating back to 1999 with the introduction of Jabber. I'm sure most of you have heard of this one as you all undoubtably use it or have used it once in your life. Most of you have used it with Google Talk. XMPP has many more capabilities than IRC and is able to be secured with pki-certificates if you so chose to. You can chat one-to-one, one-to-many, or many-to-many. And a plus is that you can now add in audio or video. Poor IRC doesn't have that power!
SIP - or better known as Session Initiation Protocol. This is the newest of them all, but not by much, dating to 2002. I know the least about SIP, most commonly used for VoIP, of which Skype has a very similar protocol. Now that Skype has been bought out by Microsoft, they have a new SIP collaboration tool out which is called Lync. Let's hope that Skype still keeps moving forward because I love it and don't particularly want the MS ram hogging programs. One thing about SIP currently is that you cannot have permanent chat rooms. Once you close the chat window, the chat session ends. This is fine for most people, but sometimes you want to be able to keep one chat going and just swap out people over a period of time.
Very technical rant, had an interesting day at work and just wanted to do some offline research and see what I could learn. Seems that SIP is going to be gaining popularity in the near future as it has the largest flexibility and potential. After that, XMPP and trailing behind for those that just don't want to move forward is IRC.
-Another great day
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