Realtime Social

XMPP’s core messaging can be extended to create group sharing and social networking apps (for example ATOM-formatted feeds).

Three features make XMPP a great choice for powering social projects:

Firstly, because each user connects with their username (in XMPP-speak, their JID), a social service can always be sure that only the right user is getting the right information. This baked-in security means XMPP is particularly a great fit for building secure group sharing applications.

Secondly, XMPP’s realtime nature means users of a social service will receive immediate updates when another user does something that involves them (for example: you were @mentioned in tybalts-party@capulet.lit).

Finally XMPP’s publish-subscribe constructs make a great foundation for building activity-feed type applications. Users can post to their feed, and XMPP will take care of propagating the updates to that user’s subscribers in a secure way.

Projects using XMPP Social

All of these projects make use of XMPP to enhance their social networking functionality.

Users Company Use Description
~1.5 billion Google Push Notifications Google provides an XMPP Interface (Link via WaybackMachine) to their push notification service. It’s also been rumoured that push notifications are delivered to the device via a proprietary binary XMPP protocol.
~500 million Apple Push Notifications Apple uses XMPP to deliver push notifications to client devices.
Catapush Push Notifications Reliable and traceable Push Notification service on dedicated XMPP channel for Android/iOS/Windows.
Buddycloud The Buddycloud Core messaging stack is a set of social services that include help developers build a complete social application and includes user-onboarding, content recommendation and media sharing features.
Movim Movim is an XMPP-based distributed social networking platform.
Salut à Toi Salut à Toi a Python based multi-frontend XMPP client featuring (micro)blogging, file sharing, games, etc. Libervia is its web frontend.