I’m a bit disappointed, but not surprised, that this initial launch of XMPP support comes without support for XMPP federation (“S2S”).  If we had S2S support for Facebook Chat, then Facebook users could talk with users on any XMPP/Jabber network, and vice versa.  This would also enable a particularly cool bridge between Facebook Chat and Google Talk, which are both based on XMPP, and it might even push AIM and WLM more towards supporting XMPP, so that we could have a truly universal IM network on the Internet.  (We have it for e-mail already… why not for IM?)

Of course, Facebook is still about connections to other Facebook users, and all of the group and privacy controls are based on this.  So, this is how I picture XMPP federation working with Facebook:

• A user, who we will call “Joe,” uses another XMPP network but wants to talk to Facebook Chat users.
• Joe must have a Facebook account.
• Joe goes to his Facebook account and registers his XMPP handle by adding it to his profile (just like you can add additional e-mail addresses).
• Now, Facebook sends authentication requests from all of the users that Joe can talk to on Facebook Chat to Joe’s XMPP account.  Joe can then add them to his other XMPP contact list.
• Now, Joe can talk to Facebook Chat users from his other XMPP account.  Facebook Chat users using the web interface will see Joe just like they see any other Facebook user, along with his picture and a link to his profile or whatever.  Privacy settings that they have applied to Joe apply to his extra XMPP account too.  Since he registered his XMPP handle in his profile, everyone knows who he is, and Facebook makes this connection between his XMPP account and his Facebook account obvious to Facebook Chat users.

There you have it.  Simple for Facebook Chat users using the web UI — in fact, the user experience for them doesn’t change at all.  And convenient for people who already use another XMPP account to chat (like Google Talk).

Launching XMPP support closed this long-standing bug, which was the highest-voted bug on Facebook’s Bugzilla bug tracker.  I’d love to see similar support for the XMPP federation bug!

Update, 10:34 PM:

Just for reference, you can check out Facebook Chat’s XMPP implementation status at IMTrends.  Once they support XMPP federation, we should see green checkmarks next to the server-to-server entries (like this one).

Update, February 12, 2010:

Someone actually beat me to filing a bug for XMPP federation support.  (Though I am sure I searched for “XMPP” before filing my bug and it didn’t show up.)  I’ve changed the link above to point to the earlier bug.

I looked at many options for this.  The easiest solution seems like it would be to use an existing online photo sharing site, like Flickr or Windows Live Spaces.  I looked at four or five of these, and none of them really offered what I was looking for.  And what was that, exactly?

Access control. I want to be able to upload a bunch of photos for the general public to see, but have more that friends and family can log in to view. I want to be able to assign users into groups and set some photos visible only to certain groups.

Tagging. Some existing services have limited support for tagging. I really like Windows Photo Gallery’s hierarchical tagging. I wanted some way to bring this into my online photo gallery.

(Hold on, why don’t I just use Facebook? It seems to fit the bill so far. Well, how about these…)

Download the full-size, original photos. Users who have accounts should be able to download the full photo for archival or printing, not just a scaled-down web version. And I’d like the photos on the web site itself to also be reasonably high resolution… no 640×480 junk.

Easily managed appearance and organization of photos. Specifically, I want photos to be presented chronologically, and I don’t want to have to do some tedeous rearranging or even be sure to upload photos in the correct order to get them to appear in the order I want.

After dismissing the idea of using an existing online service, I thought about writing my own. I started working on my own online photo application. It was to support everything I mentioned above, and even support importing XMP metadata information saved by Windows Photo Gallery and expose the hierarchical tag tree for users to browse. I made some good progress on this application during the previous summer, but I ended up dropping it because I simply do not have the time to devote to it.

However, all of that effort was not lost. I finally settled on Gallery (what a name), an open-source PHP based photo gallery web app. I extended the metadata module provided with it to support reading XMP metadata from Windows Photo Gallery (tags, corrected dates, and captions), using code I had written for this that was originally intended to be used in my own photo application. This makes uploading photos that I have already organized in Windows Photo Gallery very easy for me. I made some other minor tweaks to the app, but now it is up and running at gallery.aaron-kelley.net.

Here’s what you need to know if you want to check out my photo gallery!

I decided not to expose tag information directly for privacy reasons. However, you can search on the tags. My tags are pretty detailed, so if you put in a location, person, or whatever in the search box, you may be able to find photos.

Personal photos (that is, photos of me, friends, family, and so on) are only visible to people who have an account and sign in. If you register for an account, it has to be verified by me before it becomes active. I will only allow friends and family to register accounts. People without accounts can still view my more “general” photos.

Account holders may also download the original version of any photo they have access to. Other web users may view the rather generously sized 1024×768 versions. (I thought about going even higher than that, but decided that it’d make the page bigger than some users’ web browser windows. I’ll check out the Google Analytics data on this after a while, and raise it if it looks like it won’t bug very many people.)

At this moment, I’ve only uploaded photos from the last two months. I will be adding more in the coming days and weeks, starting from now and going backwards. Photos marked “NEW” on the site are photos that I added within the last 7 days. (After I run out of digital photos, I hope to digitize some “traditional photos” and make them available. But I have lots of digital photos that I have yet to even sort through and tag for myself.)

Did everyone forget that almost the same thing happened a little more than a year ago? Are we learning anything here? I wonder what the next thing will be.

I’m taking a break from all of that until they get their act together.