Who new? Qunu.

I always know when I get an email from Murray Gray, because he writes to me from the future. He's in Australia, near the leading edge of tomorrow. I'm in California, which is yesterday, relatively speaking.

Murray's subject, however is instantaneous. He's into IM: instant messaging. And here's what he's doing about it, with a new project called Qunu.

Let's say you're stuck in GIMP with a layer problem or have issues installing a particular printer driver? What are the chances of you getting instant support from someone who knows their stuff and who actually wants to help? Pretty low. You could ask a buddy on your IM list, visit countless sites, forums or knowledge bases on the Net, or even go to the manufacturer's website. You may eventually find what you are looking for, but how long can it take sometimes to achieve resolution?

Now let's imagine an open IM system that allows you to connect immediately with the very person you need to talk to, who's online when you are, and who's passionate and knowledgeable in area you're having problems. Qunu makes this possible though an innovative cross-platform SDK that integrates with any software application as well as a fully-fledged standalone application.

In short, it's community helping community. Anyone can download the software and ask for help, and likewise, anyone can provide help. Experts can receive direct requests for help, or can dive into the pool of requests and help with issues in which they're knowledgeable

Software publishers and IT companies now have an incredible opportunity to allow their dedicated, passionate users to evangelize on their behalf, and an even greater opportunity to connect with users and solve problems before they end up as PR nightmares.

Qunu traces back to an idea by Joseph E. Trent on the (now defunct) BeNews forum in January 2000. The idea piqued the interest of Helmar Rudolph (formerly of Opera Software and Sonork) and Murray, who joint-financed development by Justin Kirby of openaether.org using his in-house toolkit for XMPP/Jabber development.

Qunu is based on Jabber's XMPP (eXtensible Message and Presence Protocol), and Mozilla. Here's Murray's technical case:

The core portability layer of Qunu is a thin wrapper around the Apache Portable Runtime (APR), which has been released under the APL in the spirit of the libraries its directly built upon. The Jabber protocol then uses the APR wrapper for threads and networking portability. The XML parsing library that is used is Xerces-c XML parser whose maturity and featureset are truly astounding.

Qunu is both a cross-platform SDK framework and stand-alone application, making it suitable for any type of implementation environment, software or topic area. For reasons of brevity, we have glossed over the details of setting up Jabber streams, creating XUL windows and handling events, but suffice it to say, the Mozilla application framework and Jabber protocols are complex and elegant and Qunu has leveraged this into a useful and extensible framework.

Murray invites readers to download the code, play with it, and contribute improvements back to the new community.

- Doc Searls