Presence Standardization Efforts
There was, and still is, significant work done in several working groups on achieving a standardization for presence-related protocols.
In 1999, a group called the Instant Message and Presence Protocol (IMPP) working group (WG), was formed within the Internet Engineering Task Force organization (IETF) in order to develop protocols and data formats for simple presence and instant messaging services. Unfortunately, IMPP WG was not able to come to consensus on a single protocol for presence. Instead it issued a common profile for presence and instant messaging (CPP) which defined semantics for common services of presence to facilitate the creation of gateways between presence services. Thus any two CPP-compatible presence protocol suites are automatically interoperable.
In 2001, the SIMPLE working group was formed within IETF to develop a suite of CPP-compliant standards for presence and instant messaging applications over the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). The SIMPLE activity specifies extensions to the SIP protocol which deal with a publish and subscribe mechanism for presence information and sending instant messages. These extensions include rich presence document formats, privacy control, "partial publications" and notifications, past and future presence, watcher information and more. Interestingly enough - despite its name SIMPLE is far from simple. It is described in about 30 documents (most of them are still drafts) on more than 1,000 pages. This is in addition to the complexity of the SIP protocol stack on which SIMPLE is based.
At the end of 2001, Nokia, Motorola, and Ericsson formed the Wireless Village (WV) initiative to define a set of universal specifications for mobile Instant Messaging and Presence Services (IMPS) and presence services for wireless networks. In October 2002, Wireless Village was consolidated into the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) and a month later released the first version of the XML-based OMA Instant Message and Presence Service (IMPS). IMPS defines a system architecture, syntax, and semantics for representation of presence information and a set of protocols for the four primary features: presence, IM, groups, and shared content. Presence is the key, enabling technology for the IMPS.
The XML-based XMPP or Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol was designed and is currently maintained by the XMPP Standards Foundation. This IM protocol, which is a robust and widely extended protocol, is also the protocol used in the commercial implementation of Google Talk and Facebook Chat. In October 2004, the XMPP working group at IETF published the documents RFC 3920, RFC 3921, RFC 3922 and RFC 3923, to standardize the core XMPP protocol.
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