Anyone can build a Messenger client—with open standards access via XMPP

We’ve previously talked about the principles that guide us as we strive to continue delivering the most convenient ways to chat with the people who matter the most to you. Today we’re taking another step, with the public availability of access to the Messenger network via XMPP, an open standard. This means that anyone can build innovative messaging clients—either stand-alone or built into their devices—that include access to Messenger’s 300 million active users.

This builds on our perspective that you should simply be able to:

• Choose the services you want, without re-spamming your friends with invites—More than 300 million people actively use Messenger every month. The vast majority of them also actively use other services like Facebook and Yahoo, where they have contact lists that they build and deepen every day. Because of this, we’ve steadily connected Messenger to other services, so that your Windows PC, Windows Phone, and Hotmail make it easy to sign in to your existing services and chat with who you want, without having to re-spam all your friends and force them to join yet another network.
• Choose the devices you want, without having to switch services—Similarly, Messenger has been available for many years on a wide range of devices, using apps built both by Microsoft and through our broad partner program. In addition to the classic Messenger desktop programs for the PC and Mac, Messenger clients are available for most mobile phones and mobile operators around the world, including Windows Phone 7, iPhone, Android, Blackberry OS, Nokia Symbian, Samsung Bada, and many more.

We continue with our commitment to these principles, especially around enabling people to access Messenger from all of their devices by exposing an XMPP interface to Windows Live Messenger. XMPP is the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol which is an open technology for real-time communication used by a number of popular IM networks from Google Talk to Facebook Chat and now Messenger.

With the release of the XMPP interface for Messenger, any XMPP based chat client that can also support OAuth 2.0 for authentication will be able to connect to Windows Live Messenger to enable people to see which of their friends are online and chat with them in real-time and.