[JDEV] Jabber Advocacy

[Michael Brown]

RE: [JDEV] Question on using NIO with SAXCan someone tell me if there is any organised Jabber advocacy?

[Long rant follows]

I get the feeling that Jabber is a great standard with way less publicity than it deserves.  I can see the day where Microsoft wins the IM wars in the same way as they won the browser wars, and Jabber lives on as nothing more than a niche product for the rest of its life.

Back before AOL started blocking Jabber servers, the mentality was that Jabber was for us - we were right because we ran Jabber - less educated users ran AIM, but we could still talk to them.  This isn't the case now.

I think there are ways we can work against this, and maximise the chances for Jabber to flourish, but I'm sure that there are many I haven't thought of, so I look forward to other peoples ideas.  

Is there anyone out there that is of the mindset that we shouldn't do anything, and let people judge Jabber on it's technical merits alone?  There is something to be said for the argument that time is better spent improving Jabber than fighting political battles that we cannot win, but I believe that without some exposure to Jabber, the public are not even going to think about it let alone switch to it.  Remember, we are working against MSN Messenger icons on every Windows desktop from XP up; those annoying AOL ads where the schoolgirl says that she is so pleased she can chat with her friends since AOL invented Instant Messaging.

First of all, I am surprised that there is no Jabber Advocacy mailing list - has one ever been proposed?  Or maybe this is the role of the Jabber Foundation/Council.  Either way, it doesn't seem obvious or grass roots enough.

How about a Jabber webring?  Anything that can group together all the great websites out there can show that there is a significant community behind Jabber, and it is more than the sum of all its parts.  Is there a way we can set up a Jabber ad server, so we can promote each others products on our websites?

Corporate Support.  It's good to see companies like Jabber Inc out there, as it give the technology a corporate farce, but lets face it - Jabber Inc doesn't have much in the way of industry muscle.  What are the chances of getting some major companies involved?  From what I can tell, the only major player that is showing any support is IBM, which is strange, because Jabber is (at least in part) directly competing against its Lotus Sametime product.  What about seeing if Apple could be convinced to place an icon on the next MacOS desktop.  Redhat should be a sure bet.  Putting an icon to a Linux client on every desktop install of Redhat would increase our userbase and give Redhat a feature that they appear to be lacking when compared to Microsoft's offering.  The same should be true for any other Linux distributions, but I have yet to hear of one such company that is even running a Jabber server yet.  Also, there are other companies - Sun, Palm, Nokia, Sony, etc that make platforms that could benefit from Jabber.  Then there are web based companies - all the free mail providers that could use an offering similar to MSN Messenger that Hotmail is offering; Portal services etc.  The list goes on.

Media coverage.  All the stories about AOL blocking MS, IM wars and even interoperability stories - Jabber is almost never mentioned.  Jabber Inc do a good job with their press releases, but there has to be a way to make the media more aware of what Jabber is, and what it does (and why)

IETF.  Can someone who understands the inner workings of the IETF give us a short summary of what process we need to go though to get Jabber listed as an Internet standard, and an honest estimate of our chances of succeeding?

ISP's. The idea behind Jabber is that each ISP can offer an IM service in the same way they now offer mail and news servers.  Does anyone know of any ISP that is actually doing this?  Can we get some examples of how popular it is?  Feedback from the customers?  Can anyone think of any ways to encourage ISP's to offer a Jabber server other than writing emails?  Can anyone provide an example email that we can send to our local ISP's?

Comments,

Michael
JID: zilch at jabber.com

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