Enable IM by integrating Jabber client as a bp-component

One of my essential daily tools is Gtalk or Google Talk. I use it to communicate with people in my own company, clients, contractors, suppliers and just about anyone who uses it. Gmail allows you to do two things directly from your browser:

• Instant messaging
• Gmail notifications

I would like to see a component created for BuddyPress that allows users to connect and communicate via a similar browser chat to Gmail. I remember when facebook launched their chat facility it really opened up a new avenue of communication. Suddenly you could chat to whoever was online in real-time.

In South Africa a mobile chat system called MXit became very popular and as noted below started out using Jabber to power its discussion platform, read more:

Until February 2008, the MXit service was backed by ejabberd, an open source instant messaging server that is based on the open standard Jabber. MXit replaced ejabberd with a new self-developed, high scalability software core to assure continual growth and innovation requirements can be met. Although external Jabber clients were originally allowed to connect to the MXit backed servers, this had to be discontinued due to instability induced by unreliable and untrustworthy sites.

I have mentioned that we are looking developing a social network for a political party, we need an IM bp-component to improve information sharing. Some of the people involved in the volunteer programs are in areas where people don’t have internet in their homes, but they almost everyone has a mobile phone. Volunteers will need to be able to access the social networking site and gain access to relevant geographic information, examples:

• Events in their area
• Volunteers located near by
• Contact details of key people involved

There are PHP libraries like Lightr, which is in Alpha, or xmpphp, which seems to be the better option. These libraries could allow us to integrate BuddyPress with a Jabber server. Some things I have noted from my research:

• It would seem like eJabberd is the more popular Jabber server to run, it has a high level of compliance with XMPP and supports distributed computing by clusterin, all quite appealing!
• JabberMixClient is a great GPL mobile client that could be used on mobile phones
• Still note sure what would work as a Jabber Client for inside BuddyPress, maybe JWChat will do the trick, it is open source so thats a definite plus….

Not much of a fundi on the topic of Jabber clients and servers, but would definitely like to hear back from people on what they think.