Creator of Instant Messaging Protocol to Launch App Platform for Your Life
Jeremie Miller is a revered figure among developers, best known for building XMPP, the open source protocol that powers most of the Instant Messaging apps in the world. Now Miller has raised funds and is building …
Context & Ripple Effects
Jeremie Miller occupies a rare position in messaging: he wrote XMPP, the open-source protocol that powers most of the world's instant-messaging apps, so anything he builds arrives with an installed base of protocol-literate developers. The 2008 crop of IM add-ons — services like Social.im that bolted Facebook onto existing messengers — showed demand for making chat do more than chat.
Now Miller has raised funding to build an app platform 'for your life,' per ReadWriteWeb's report on February 4, 2011. The move matters because it comes from the protocol's creator rather than a portal or carrier, and because it tests whether an open-protocol lineage can anchor a consumer platform.
First-order effects
- The XMPP developer community gains (or loses) a flagship: Miller's funded startup becomes the highest-profile attempt to commercialize the protocol's creator's vision, and developers watching it will decide whether to build there.
- Miller's new backers have bought into a personal-data platform thesis, shifting his focus from maintaining open infrastructure to competing for consumers against closed networks.
Second-order effects
- Incumbent messaging platforms and social networks face a credibility argument they cannot easily buy: an open-protocol alternative pitched by the man who standardized their transport layer, pressuring them to open up APIs or cede the 'open' framing.
- If the platform attracts third-party apps, it creates a distribution channel outside the app-store duopoly of the era, giving small developers leverage in revenue-share negotiations elsewhere.
Third-order effects
- The bet implies messaging evolving from a communication transport into an application surface where identity, contacts, and context live — a structure that favors whoever controls the protocol over whoever owns the client.
- Should open-protocol platforms prove viable at the consumer layer, the industry could split between walled-garden messengers and federated ones, with regulators and interoperability advocates gaining a concrete example to point to.
The trend: Instant messaging is being repositioned from a simple transport protocol into the connective tissue of a personal app platform, with open-protocol veterans like Jeremie Miller challenging the closed networks that grew on top of their standards.