[JDEV] Slashdot Article

[Justin]

> I really agree. It's a double-edged sword, Jabber gets a lot of press
> because it's instant messaging but some people can't seem to go beyond
> that, when it's real power lies in the extensibility and elegance of the
> protocol itself. 'come for the instant messaging, stay for the protocol'

Jabber is still very good for instant messaging.  The problem is that people 
come to Jabber for the transports.  After a bad experience with the ICQ 
transport, they conclude that Jabber sucks (and how they are now going to use 
Trillian, etc).  Since when does ICQ have anything to do with the price of 
rice?

Even most OSS folks think that Jabber is a Gaim clone.  When I first contacted 
the developers of Kopete (a KDE multi-IM client) about integrating Jabber, 
they told me that doing so was redundant since they already supported 
AIM/ICQ/MSN/Yahoo natively.  After my careful explanation to them that Jabber 
itself was an IM protocol, they finally realized what I was saying and became 
very enthusiastic about adding it.  I think lots of OSS people would be more 
interested in Jabber if only they knew what it was.

This awareness problem is huge.  Did you notice how many Slashdot comments 
were related to transports?  Someone should submit a Slashdot article that 
actually explains what the heck Jabber really is, so we can end the confusion 
already.

> I had posted a reply to the article, about this subject, and someone
> mentioned possibly renaming the protocol in order to help people realise
> this.

That may have been me :)

-Justin