[JDEV] What does een IM system need to reach the end user (Was: Re: [JDEV] Poll about who will use Jabber when Trillian comes out)

[maqi at jabberstudio.org]

On Wed, 11 Jun 2003, Dave Smith wrote:

>> As with the whole Jabber philosophy, we don't need a "big jabber.org
>> community site", we need several smaller sites with good setups - I
>> think of a *good* WWW presentation of the major Jabber servers
[...]
> It's not cheap to host a "central" Jabber server. So far, we've been
> lucky -- good people have donated bandwidth for jabber.org
[...]
> Besides, the whole _point_ of the Jabber project is that there should
> be a host  (pardon the pun) of decentralized Jabber servers, like email.

Either I misunderstand you or you misunderstood me. That's exactly what I
meant: I don't say "let's make jabber.org more colorful!", I say "the way
to go is to make the major Jabber servers more user friendly".

Take a look at the WWW pages of the Jabber server listed on
http://www.jabber.org/user/publicservers.php

Most servers do not look user friendly at all from a "WWW" point of view -
no information on the web sites, no client downloads, some even don't have
an easy-to-find website at all... I think *that's* a problem, not
jabber.org being a bit technical (in fact I think it presents a very good
mix and is easy to navigate so absolutely no need to change jabber.org's
basic WWW design [again]).

Perhaps it would be a good idea to have some kind of quality requirements
for a Jabber server to be listed in the public servers list. As a start, I
don't think it's good to have sites listed there that don't run a decent
WWW page at all. Another requirement could be that there should be links
to the User Guide/General FAQ/End-User FAQ (time for i18n). Or, as a
start, removing defunct servers from the list would also be good ;-). I'll
try to contribute a bit to make the list better.

Regards