Worse is better There's an article by Joe Hildebrand, Jabber.com's chief architect, at NetworkWorldFusion about the nature of XMPP. The paragraph that really stood out for me was:

XMPP serves as a universal transport layer for XML structured data. It embeds presence and context sensitivity into that data, which lets the data be routed efficiently to the most appropriate resource.

This made me think again about XMPP competing with other XML messaging middleware. There are lots of big players out there with very featureful and robust products, and of course the current XMPP implementations aren't exactly tailored for same types of tasks. However, XMPP's XML DNA and its seamless distributed nature are too compelling, and will eventually tip the scales in XMPP's favor if they haven't already.

If you don't believe me, take a look at what Sam Ruby is trying to accomplish using XMPP for comment authentication. This is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of non-IM related functionality that XMPP can provide.

In this case, worse is way better.

(via Jabber.org)