Along with the launch of Presently.com, we quietly revamped the backend architecture of Present.ly to better use the eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) as the standard message delivery system. You may have noticed near-instant updates on the new web interface — this is primarily due to the super-fast messaging features of eJabberd, the XMPP server that Present.ly runs on.

We believe that XMPP will play a bigger role powering dynamic, real-time web applications in the coming years and have previously blogged as such. While most people in the industry know of XMPP only in its instant messaging role, the fact that there are fully fleshed out specifications for most common enterprise messaging problems as subsets of the XMPP specification is often sadly overlooked.

So what does this mean for Present.ly? In the short term, as you may have already noticed, you will see a major speed improvement posting and receiving updates. In the long term, we are planning on making our user interface a lot more dynamic — details are top-secret at the moment. We are also working on moving over our notification systems completely to XMPP, which will result in you receiving update notifications more rapidly over all your devices. As we grow, we’ll be leveraging eJabberd’s high scalability (due to it being written in Erlang) to provide a seamless, quick user experience.

We are also actively contributing back to the open-source XMPP community. Read about ruby_bosh, the first Ruby library to handle BOSH sessioning in your Ruby applications. We have also made various stability and speed fixes to the stropheruby library, which is based on the libstrophe C library (announcement soon). Both are available on Github for general use. Intridea’s proud to be a part of the XMPP community, and will be heavily using and promoting the technology with both our products and services.