PSYC (Protocol for SYnchronous Conferencing) is a flexible text-based protocol for delivery of data to a flexible amount of recipients or people, by unicast or multicast. It is primarily used for chat conferencing, multicasting presence, friendcasting, newscasting and plain instant messaging, but not limited to that. Existing systems can easily use PSYC, since PSYC hides its complexity from them. For example if an application wants to send data to one person or a group of people, it just needs to drop a few lines of text into a TCP connection or signed UDP packet to a static address. In other words: trivial. In computer networks, unicast is the sending of information packets to a single destination. ... Orange circles represent endpoints, and green circles represent routing points. ... A screenshot of PowWow, one of the first instant messengers with a graphical user interface Instant messaging is the act of instantly communicating between two or more people over a network such as the Internet. ... The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is one of the core protocols of the Internet protocol suite. ... The User Datagram Protocol (UDP) is one of the core protocols of the Internet protocol suite. ...

The PSYC network resembles more the Web rather than IRC, which it once was inspired by. Each administrator of a machine on the Internet can install a PSYC server which has equal rights in the worldwide network. No hierarchies and no boundaries. The administrator then has the right to decide which rooms or people to host, without interfering with other PSYC servers. Should an administrator behave incorrectly towards her users, they will simply move on to a different server. Thus, administrators must behave to be a popular PSYC host for their friends and social network. Error creating thumbnail: convert: unable to open image `/mnt/upload3/wikipedia/commons/d/d1/First_Web_Server. ... Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a form of instant communication over the Internet. ...

PSYC theory and protocol was first written down in 1995. For reasons of perfectionism, version 1.0 of the protocol definition and appropriately stable software implementation, suitable for worldwide deployment, are still taking time to be released. However both software and protocol have been in productive use ever since 1997. Especially in recent years PSYC has become a very useful tool, solving problems other technologies are facing by taking new approaches.

The reference implementation of PSYC is called psyced and also implements the Jabber and IRC protocols for better integration into existing communication infrastructures. So even if you're not interested in a new protocol, you can use it as a more advanced IRC and Jabber server rolled into one. psyced is a multi-protocol gateway and server application supporting the PSYC, Jabber, IRC, TELNET and more protocols such as HTTP. It performs as a node in distributed chat and instant messaging networks such as PSYC and Jabber. ... This article is about a communications protocol. ...

External links

• http://www.psyc.eu/
• http://about.psyc.eu/