[JDEV] Jabber Advocacy

[Jim Seymour]

"Ashvil" <ashvil at i3connect.net> wrote:
> 
[Julian Missig <julian at jabber.org> had written:]
> > I've certainly tried a few times, but we just don't have a good enough
> > handle on why the general population should care about Jabber.
> > Personally, I'm having a hard enough time selling it to fellow open
> > source developers, the same people who refuse to MS Office documents
> > because they're closed! (Yet they're fine using AIM/ICQ/MSN/Yahoo!)
> 
> Why ? What do they not understand here. Can we this find out. What are their
> objections. If Jabber cannot win on it's home turf, then it a very serious
> issue.
[snip]

Hanging out in #gaim on OPN, here are the two reasons I hear most
often:

    1. "I'd use it, but nobody else I know does.  All my friends
	are on (AIM|MSN|ICQ|Y!M)."  and "I don't know anybody on
	Jabber."

    2. "Where is/are the server(s)?" and "It's not stable.  I keep
	getting kicked off."

The first I counter by trying to improve Gaim's Jabber plugin support.
Being a multi-protocol IM client, it's easy for people running it to
add another account.  Thus, to the "I don't know anybody on Jabber," I
reply with "Yes, you do.  Most of the people on this channel have
jabber.org accounts.  It's easy to get one with Gaim now."  That
frequently gets 'em interested enough to at least *get* a jabber.org
account.

I also avoid adding a proprietary protocol's user to my buddylist if
they have, or are capable of having, a jabber.org account.  In fact:
since my Y!M account is not well-known, I don't have an ICQ account at
all, I absolutely *refuse* to even consider M$N and I run "permit only"
on AIM, it's easy for me to "encourage" folks to contact me via Jabber
instead of the others :).

As far as the server(s) question... well, that's a trickier one.  It
does seem to me that jabber.org seems to be getting more stable.  But
to be brutally honest: it's kind of hard to beat AOL's AIM reliability
w/o a helluva server farm and a mind-boggling amount of bandwidth ;).

I've thought about pitching to my ISP the idea of them hosting a Jabber
server for their customers.  Maybe if enough ISPs did this, and linked
their servers together (I'm *guessing* that's what s2s is for?): ISPs
could offer Jabber to their customers as a value-added thing and offer
the user-base exposure via s2s w/o one or two or a few in particular
having to carry an excessive amount of non-customer load?  But the
server codebase would have to be rock-solid for this to work.  As
anybody who is familiar with the ISP landscape right now should be
well-aware: ISPs have been cutting-back on resources.  They won't be
looking to add workload for something that may or may not be regarded
as a value-add by their customers.  Especially during infancy.

And there'd have to be dependable, easy-to-use, easy-to-install, easy-
to-configure, and reasonably familiar-looking clients for them to
offer.  May sound simple, but take it from somebody whose been "asking
around" about M$-Win clients for possible deployment at work: it ain't
necessarily so.

In the final analysis: part of the problem is certainly a "chicken and
egg" delimma.  This will only be solved by steadily and mercilessly
chipping away at it, user-by-user.


Regards,
Jim
-- 
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