Matt Tucker discusses how XMPP (Jabber) can be used for cloud services and architectures. Some key benefits of XMPP over traditional web services include its support for real-time bidirectional communication, presence, and easier firewall traversal. Open source XMPP servers like Openfire and client libraries provide tools to build scalable cloud components and services. Examples like Twitter's use of XMPP for its firehose API demonstrate how XMPP can enable new types of cloud applications.