The instant messaging world should prepare for a major quake — thanks to Facebook, which seems to be all set to launch a new connection interface that would allow Facebook Chat to work with any kind of XMPP client.

The news of this development was first reported by Mickaël Rémond on the company blog of Process One, a Paris-based messaging startup. “It now seems the launch is close as the XMPP software stack has been deployed on chat.facebook.com,” writes Rémond, who is a leading expert on instant messaging and ejabberd and is an active member of the XMPP Standard Foundation. Continue »

Mario Queiroz, VP Production Management for Google Android, talked about Android and its competition, the iPhone, in an interview with FOX Business Network’s Liz Claman. Queiroz touts his company’s approach to form partnerships and alliances with carriers and handset makers as a better way of doing business compared with the iPhone. You can watch the video, which comes across as an Android advertorial.

Google is getting ready to make its Wave technology more widely available, CEO Eric Schmidt told a gathering of reporters in its Boston offices.

“[Google's Wave team is] getting ready for a much broader distribution. Ready means very soon. Very soon is like weeks not years,” Schmidt said. “The experiment has yielded a very, very innovative model and a lot of buzz. We want to see if it will scale.”

Maybe when more people are using it, there is a good chance someone will figure it out and explain to me how it is supposed to improve my online life. (If you want a good Google Wave Primer, check out this research note over on our subscription research service, GigaOM Pro.)

Amongst other things, Schmidt commented on media, news and bloggers, reminding me of what my mother once told me: it is better to keep quiet about things you don’t know much about. Just because they can sell online ads and do search, who do Googlers think they know everything about media and politics? Why do they think they have all the answers, when they can’t get more than half their products right?!

Photo courtesy of Charles Haynes via Flickr.

The great Skype legal mess is about to come to an end, thanks to a settlement between  eBay — and private investors led by Silver Lake Partners — and Skype co-founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis. As part of the deal, the two Skype founders will get 10 percent of the company in exchange for allowing it to use the Global Index technology from their IP company, JoltID. They have an option to pay $83 million for another 3 percent of the new Skype. They will have two board seats on the 23-person board. These details were reported by Kara Swisher on her blog last night. I reported the news of a settlement this past weekend. Since then, more details have emerged that Index Ventures and Michael Volpi were both out of the deal.

Ever since Blake Krikorian left Sling Media, the place shifting startup that he sold to Echostar for $380 million in September 2007, he’s been lying low. Instead of trying to build yet another startup, he has been spending time trying to put together a killer home entertainment system that uses HDMI-over-fiber, dozens of iPod touch devices and many Apple displays spread across his home. “It will either be a great thing or my family will hate me,” Krikorian joked when he stopped by in our office last week. This do-it-yourself project is a way for him to think about what he will do next.

And as he waits for inspiration to strike, Krikorian is going to join the board of directors of Clicker.com, a Los Angeles-based online-video content discovery company started by Jim Lanzone, the former CEO of Ask.com. He is also going to make a minority investment in the company; a news announcement is likely to be made later this week. Continue »

There are no longer any doubts that T-Mobile has hitched its smartphone bandwagon to Google’s Android operating system. The company today said that it will be selling four Android-powered handsets to its (current and potential) customers during the vital holiday season. It is clear T-Mobile is hoping to sell a lot of smartphones. As part of its push, the company is making some plans regarding applications and application discovery. Here are some excerpts from their email pitch sent earlier today: Continue »

So it is official: Apple says it has more than 100,000 apps in its iTunes App Store, a bit of news that was reported by AppShopper and Mobclix last week. In terms of landmarks, 100,000 is merely a number, soon to be forgotten as the amount of apps crosses 200,000 or a million or whatever. Why it matters is that these growing number of applications are making our smartphones more personal — even more personal than our PCs. Continue »