Mojo Messaging Service for webOS: More than Just Push

If you haven't taken a quick look at Michael Abbot's Web 2.0 video, here's something you may have missed: the Mojo Messaging Service.  As we mentioned last week, Palm is jumping into cloud services and their Mojo Messaging Service looks like it's going to be a sight better than MobileMe and Apple's push notifications.  This could be more than just push, folks; don't believe us?  Here's the big man himself:

The first service that we're going to be launching [...] is the Mojo Messaging Service.  This provides a simple, XMPP-based pub-sub frame work were you can send events, or push events, into applications in real time that are running on webOS.

Why is this interesting?  Well, let's say for example if you're a developer and you want to build an application around the fact that I want to target a particular set of users in an area because there's traffic congestion and I want those folks to know about that -- you as a developer can build such an application.

We don't know about you, but that sounds like a location-aware push, as in "Push this alert out to all users whose devices happen to be in South Chicago." 

Now, it's theoretically possible that the iPhone could do this someday -- the app on the iPhone would just need to periodically report its location back to the developer (though, of course, you'd have to have the app open to do that, whereas on the Pre the app could sit quietly in the background, updating your location on a pre-set basis).  It's also theoretically possible that we're reading a little too much into the above paragraph.

Here's on thing that isn't a theory: however robust these webOS push notifications are, they are going to be a lot more useful and a lot less annoying than the pop-up/modal style notifications the iPhone will pick up this summer.

Oh, and if you're wondering what all that "xmpp pub-sub" stuff is about, here's the short version: standards-based XML for formatting, receiving, and sending data.  Here's a bit more info, but what you need to know is that it's literally not much more complicated than developing webOS apps themselves.