[JDEV] Best way to drive Jabber adoption?

[Bart van Bragt]

GuruJ wrote:
> 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.
Very true, this is one of it's strengths..

> 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?
Very true.. But that's when Trillian/GAIM come into the picture :D

> So, how does a relatively small organisation such as JSF and its hordes 
> of volunteers compete against the behemoths of AOL, Yahoo! & Microsoft?
Again quoting Matt Mankins; by using a bottom-up approach.
The strength of Jabber is not that the JSF has billions of dollars or 
euro's to spend and it's not that they can market Jabber to death. It's 
the simple fact that there is an 'army' of Jabber enthousiasts out 
there. So IMO the only option Jabber has is by starting at the endpoint, 
just like Linux does. Try to get as many 'normal' users to get to use 
Jabber as possible and then Jabber will work it's way up the foodchain 
automagically :D

> (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.
IMO choosing an 'official' client is near impossible. It would also 
invalidate the whole idea behind Jabber. But with the compliance program 
it should be possible to point out several 'sanctioned' clients.

> (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.
IMO it's a two way process. You'll have to concentrate on the company 
sysadmins/managers and the consumers. Consumers are also 
network-managers and company have consumers working in them :D So if you 
gain popularity in one of those groups you automatically gain popularity 
in the other.

> (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.
Eeeh, one of the main idea's behind Jabber is that it's a distributed 
network :D

Email doesn't require a central directory, a central server or something 
else that costs a lot of money... When there is some critical mass ISP's 
and companies will start setting up Jabber servers for their 
clients/employees. When that happens the need for servers like 
jabber.org will (hopefully) start to decrease..
Of course it should be very easy to setup a Jabber server then. It 
should be as easy as installing your average IMAPd (which automagically 
uses your /etc/passwd file) :D