Why you shouldn't invite me on to any technical standards committees

So here I was, reading a Steven Hodson post and promoting the lastfmfeeds FriendFeed room, when Tyler asked me a question:

whats your xmpp username?

Heck, I don't even know my OpenID username, which I set up long, long ago.

The XMPP Standards Foundation gave me some insight:

This website provides complete information about the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP), an open XML technology for presence and real-time communication developed by the Jabber open-source community in 1999, formalized by the IETF in 2002-2004, and continuously extended through the standards process of the XMPP Standards Foundation.

I knew that I had heard the term in relation to Twitter, but I hadn't bothered to read Biz's post on the subject. Now I have.

Last year, the folks over at Technorati approached us about building something unique to suit their needs regarding search. We created a special real-time feed of every single public Twitter update to be delivered over the open XMPP protocol. Despite delivery over a faster and cheaper technology, this entire public feed of Twitter updates is resource intensive—we had to be very careful about giving it out.

Technorati no longer uses the feed. However, a few other companies have since approached Twitter and made arrangements with us to gain access. There are four services currently accessing our public timeline feed over XMPP: Twittervision, Zappos, FriendFeed, and Summize.

But since Hodson's post specifically concerned last.fm, I wondered if there was a link there. I found this from Bob Wyman:

If you send your last.fm username to the BBC over XMPP, they will read your last.fm profile and then send you an XMPP message whenever they are playing
a song by an artist you like.

This led me to a post by Matthew Wood at the BBC Radio Labs:

Just a little XMPP toy: send the message lastfm yourlastfmusername to radio1@hug.hellomatty.com and we'll ping you when one of our music stations is playing a tune by an artist you like to listen to. Fun, huh?

Behind the scenes I'm pulling your last.fm profile via tastebroker.org which wrangles it into APML. This means I'm storing your preferences in a way that should work as well for speech shows as it does for music. So I could use tastebroker's view of your del.icio.us feed to let you know when Radio 4 is broadcasting something you might be interested in.

So I ended up answering the question with my last.fm name, which is ontarioemperor (same as my FriendFeed name, which Tyler already knows).

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