[JDEV] Best way to drive Jabber adoption?

[GuruJ]

I know heaps of people have already commented on this, but personally I 
think Jabber's biggest strength (*at the moment*) is in Jabber networks 
that run behind company firewalls.

That's how I first learnt about Jabber, and it's still the killer app 
for me as an IT specialist.  I think people will still seek out and 
adopt Jabber to get this very significant benefit.

While it would be lovely to have a consumer-grade IM product out there, 
the fact is that centrally hosting such a service (as people have 
pointed out) costs heaps of money for bandwidth and server costs. 
Additionally, the administration, maintenance, moderation and content 
creation time would be almost prohibitive on a volunteer network.

Finally, as long as interoperability remains a distant dream, there will 
always be great difficulty in converting people to Jabber.  Why use 
Jabber with a MSN gateway (that may or may not work on any given week) 
when you can just use MSN?

So, how does a relatively small organisation such as JSF and its hordes 
of volunteers compete against the behemoths of AOL, Yahoo! & Microsoft?

I think the Jabber community has three main options:

(1) Set up a centralized jabber.net website.  Pick an 'official' client. 
  I understand that agreement on the 'best' of anything is almost 
impossible for an open-source community, but it's *essential* for 
end-users to feel comfortable that a 'sanctioned' client will do what 
they need, and be well-supported.  As noted above, this may be very hard 
to fund properly.

(2) Ignore the consumer market and continue to drive adoption in 
company-wide IM systems.  Once IM interoperability becomes critical mass 
and/or more funding becomes available, move to a more consumer-oriented 
model.

(3) Come up with a way for consumers to connect to Jabber-based systems 
through some kind of distributed mechanism (think Gnutella or 
BitTorrent) that only *authenticates* centrally at jabber.net.  In this 
way, multiple small servers could potentially serve a very large user 
community.  Of course, the big problem here is that the Jabber protocol 
doesn't make provision for this kind of system ... yet.

What does everyone think?

Regards,

GuruJ.