[JDEV] Poll about who will use Jabber when Trillian comes out

[Bart van Bragt]

>  I guess the question keeps boiling down to, is this
> a major JSF/jabber.org problem?  Are we supposed to foster the end user
> community and develop the protocol/system?  I think that's just the tip
> of the iceberg for my thoughts, so if you want some more, just ask.
I think it is.. As matt matt put it; we're going to have to 'push' 
Jabber with a bottom-up approach.

Companies like MS/IBM are able to push SIP/SIMPLE/MSN/Whatever through 
everyone's throaths, inclusing network managers and managers. Jabber 
won't be able to do that, not without major backing from MS I'm afraid.

So IMO; yes, there needs to be a good starting point for end-users. Of 
course it's great if this could be a complete site like icq.com (well, 
icq.com is horrible but you get the idea ;) but IMO it's already a good 
start if there is something like a quickstart guide. Another point are 
the clients. Most of them are created by hackers for hackers. They do 
great stuff have all the latest and greatest but they almost all lack 
end-user documentation and quite a few us a lot of techno-babble and 
counter-intuitive (but efficient) UI designs.

 From the recent Australia/Slashdot article:

" The problem with Jabber (Score:4, Insightful)
by metamatic (202216) on Tuesday June 10, @11:13AM (#6161085)
(http://www.pobox.com/~meta/)
The problem with Jabber used to be that it didn't work. This article has 
inspired me to give it another try, and I'm glad to say it does now 
work, so I'm going to try using it for a while.

There's still a big problem that'll get in the way of user acceptance, 
however: it's extremely complicated. Some of the complication is 
unavoidable, in that you have a multi-server system with gateways to 
multiple external protocols. However, some of the issues are just down 
to the fact that it's a system where the clients are currently being 
designed and built by hackers, for hackers.

What is a message queue? Why do I need to care about it? I've never seen 
any other IM client that expected me to deal with such a thing. "Close 
the event window going to compressed mode"? Uh, whatever.

"Custom presence entries"? WTF is that, presence of people who don't 
exist? "Synchronize presence with multiple copies"--uh, why would I want 
that, in case I have multiple personalities? I just want to log on from 
wherever I am and have it work.

I'm not trying to be picky here. I'm a computer scientist. If this thing 
isn't blatantly obvious to me without looking at the documentation, 
there is zero, I repeat, zero chance that my mother and my arts graduate 
friends will be able to deal with it."

That quite nicely grasps one of the Application problems ;)

IMO it comes down to this: do we want to go for world domination or not?

If yes then we should get as many people as possible to use Jabber, it's 
of course nice to have only a bunch of developers geeking around with 
the latest and greatest but IMO it's even more wonderfull to have people 
actually use the great technology that has been created in the last 4 
years..

Just my 2 cents...

-- 
Bart van Bragt
Senior developer phpBB (www.phpbb.com)