[JDEV] Best way to drive Jabber adoption?

[Rachel Blackman]

> - It's really very much against the Jabber philosophy :D

+1 ...but see caveat below.

> IMO it would be best to have an up to date list with clients that include
> user reviews (that people can make/give on the site), votes from users
> and download counts. IMO that should be more than enough info for
> prospect users to make the right choice :D At least to get them started.

No, it won't be; I dispute that people are going to 'make the right choice'
based on those lists, any more than the existing jabber.org client list has
particularly spurred widespread adoption.

I've tried before to get people onto Jabber.  A friend of mine, Andrea,
uses Jabber at work for internal communications; the company installed
Exodus on everyone's machines, and (no offense, Peter) she says the
prevailing opinion of her co-workers is that Exodus is 'klunky.'  I happen
to love Exodus as a testing client, but I also understand what she means.

Your average IM user, such as my parents or my friend Andrea, is not a
developer.  Your average IM user wants something that looks 'professional'
inasmuch as it looks pretty and clean; my father, glancing over my shoulder
once when I was testing some Jabber stuff and had Exodus up to send to my
Trillian testbed, thought Exodus was something experimental because it
'didn't look finished'.  (Granted, my father also won't switch off of MSN
because he 'likes the smiley faces'.)  They also want something which is
relatively straightforward to use.  They also want the glitzy features...
after all, if they can voice-chat from their legacy system, why should they
change to Jabber if it doesn't support it?

And even the more savvy folks find themselves stuck with legacy systems
because the less-savvy folks don't change off it.  I have maybe 20 MSN
contacts, most of whom are family; I'll never be able to dump MSN unless I
can steer them off of it as well.

That's the value in an 'official' client.  Every Jabber client out there
has values to it; Justin's done a great job on making Psi a solid
cross-platform Jabber client that's relatively easy to use, Peter's got a
great standards testbed in Exodus, Rival Messenger has an excellent UI in
terms of looking/feeling 'smooth' and professional, and so on.  

But a single client which deliberately obscures much of the complexity of
Jabber from people, which provides the AIM, ICQ, MSN and Yahoo transports
as transparently as possible to get people over to Jabber, which has a
look-and-feel that makes people feel comfortable with it, and which has a
single place where people can go to find help on it... that would have
value in getting folks onto Jabber, too.

There are other ways, of course.  Lord knows we have enough Trillian users
in our installed userbase, and I'm hoping that adding Jabber into our
package will at least get some of the Trillian users onto Jabber as well.
I mean, as long as they're already running the client and it'll support a
new transport... :)

But I really do think there's value in a Jabber client that's aimed
specifically at obscuring the developer-nature that most Jabber clients
expose, obscuring the complexity of Jabber while still retaining the
power... that really would be of value to the Jabber community.  It isn't
wholly in keeping with the Jabber philosophy, but I think it'd still be of
benefit in helping Jabber pick up users.

-- 
Rachel Blackman <rcb at ceruleanstudios.com>
Trillian Messenger - http://www.trillian.cc/
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