I'm probably not alone among analysts who wrote XMPP off for dead a few years ago after both IBM Lotus and Microsoft announced their commitment to SIP/SIMPLE as the IM/presence protocol of choice, but to steal a line from a favorite movie of geeks all over the world, XMPP is not quite dead.

XMPP got a boost back when Google announced it would rely on the protocol for its Gtalk instant messaging service, now news is breaking that Facebook is leveraging XMPP to provide third-party client access to the recently introduced Facebook chat service.

In my conversations with developers I've heard much praise as of late over the extensibility and scalability of XMPP.  Still, it will be interesting to see how developers integrate XMPP-based messaging and presence services with VOIP/video applications based on SIP.   I expect we'll see more platforms such as the Avaya Intelligent Presence Server that are designed to integrate presence via just about any protocol or application into a master presence repository.