XMPP

The Extensible Message and Presence Protocol (XMPP) is the protocol behind instant messaging services such as Jabber and GTalk. Myles Braithwaite gave a talk at this month's PyGTA meeting, in which he described how he uses XMPP for something other than chatting. XMPP is a store and forward protocol which is ideal for pushing important automated notifications from a server application to a user who may not always be online. It is using the protocol exactly as was intended but for an unexpected purpose. It's great to see this kind of outside-the-box thinking in software solutions.