Although a number of complementary workarounds have been proposed, the resulting ad hoc solutions can be cumbersome and of varying quality With its extensions, XMPP is a powerful protocol for cloud services that has a number of advantages over traditional HTTP-based Web services. These advantages include the following: services are discoverable without the need for an external registry; asynchronous invocation gets rid of the need for ad hoc solutions like polling; and input and output types that are defined in the service make it possible to generate clients on the fly without the need for an external semantics description. XMPP is a highly intriguing option for the next generation of online services in bioinformatics due to its numerous advantages over existing technologies.