M2M and the Internet of Things

Over on Quora a user asked, What are some practical uses of the MQTT protocol?. Well, just a few examples from real-world systems in place today include:

• React to/make changes based on Facebook notifications
• Push-style messaging to low power mobile devices
• Control and monitor SCADA/lab equipmenet from probably 100 different vendors at this point
• Or, if you're an IBM house, connecting basically any two things together using IBM's brokering services (e.g. http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/19747.wss, http://www-304.ibm.com/partnerworld/gsd/solutiondetails.do?solution=40405&lc=en&stateCd=P&page=1

The big challenges for MQTT are a) there's plenty of good (and often free) software support, but still fairly little hardware support, and b) in many ways MQTT is more like HTTP than HTML -- people think that they can start writing an application using and that MQTT will do a lot of the work for them, when in fact for almost every project a new "language" (or at least an extension of an existing one) has to be developed based on the specific specifications of the project.