An update on Jabber/XMPP and PubSub

[Alex Payne]

A quick update on the status of Twitter's Jabber/XMPP service, as
pertinent to developers.

We've successfully moved to the OpenFire Jabber server, and now have
far more visibility into our XMPP services overall.

We're currently delivering the public timeline PubSub feed to several
subscribers. Those subscribers were chosen because they operate the
highest-traffic sites that make use of the feed. Enabling more
subscriptions has a visible negative impact on our internal messaging
system due to some design choices that were made in the original
implementation of our PubSub implementation. We intend to revise the
way we handle PubSub internally, but this work is not at the top of
our to-do list.

Our top priority is restoring Jabber service for regular users; some
developers make use of our standard Jabber offering for bots as well,
so this should make some of you happy. We're currently blocked on a)
debugging our presence mechanism; b) a migration to a new subdomain so
we can support multiple Jabber components (an OpenFire oddity); c)
ensuring that we have thorough rate limits in place to prevent
malicious use of the Jabber service.

Once this work is done, we'll move back to PubSub. There have been
internal discussions of the business implications of handing out the
stream of all public updates. Enabling the stream for existing and
future subscribers will likely entail signing a terms of use document
that specifies, amongst other things, that we won't allow any
resyndication of content (without a further agreement). This won't
effect some projects, but clearly will effect others. Such is
business.

Hope that's helpful!

--
Alex Payne
http://twitter.com/al3x

[Reinier Zwitserloot]

Please don't forget that direct messages for 'regular' XMPP didn't
include the atom block in the past, which makes it useless for bots.

[bear]

Thanks for the detailed update on the status - very helpful.

[twitt...@googlemail.com]

I have a couple of questions conserning this post.

1. What requirements a developer has to fullfill to get aproved to use
PubSub feed?

2. "resyndication of content"
Can you please define resyndication?
Does this mean that a developer using PubSub can't publish the content
on his site or does this mean that developers are not allowed to
create widgets, RSS-streams and APIs that allow other sites to publish
twitter content?
Examples: summize is currently offering an API. Would this be
prohibited in the future?
Quotably publishes Twitter content on the site. Is this allowed?

3. As PubSub feed is now only open to selected developers can you
please advice what would be the best way to get the public feed
without overloading twitter servers? As the ammount of requests to the
API is now limited to 20 per hour using own servers to serve updates
to users seems like the only way to go.

[Alex Payne]

We'll have a proper agreement with all the details when the time
comes. For now, we're still stabilizing our XMPP service.

--
Alex Payne
http://twitter.com/al3x

[Matthias Bauer]

Is IM completely disabled or can you enable it on a per-user basis? I
have a few services (bots) I was developing, but now can't without
switching to polling. I'd prefer to have them use XMPP, but obviously,
I'd need working XMPP for that ;)

-Matthias

[Nigel Cannings]

Mate, there's a long queue of people who want to get their apps up and running!  The answer to date has been that the high-profile users have got their access back.  The rest of us will in time.