[JDEV] Best way to drive Jabber adoption?

[Timothy Carpenter]

I totally agree with cross-platform and zero conf. (Justin Karneges, Steve
Brown et al.)

To get around the CLIENT knowing many transports and many clients having to
do that, I suggest we have each desktop run a small private SERVER that has
all the transports.

The server can use s2s to connect to the 'proper' Jabber world (or even a
spoof s2c that behaves as a client to the remote server) and use its own
local transports to directly connect from the desktop to the AIM world, MSN
world etc etc . I.e. Jabber central servers will be for Jabber-to-Jabber
only.

When on a desktop, the server can be AUTH'd to only allow a single LOCALHOST
client to connect at a time. This would mean a very limited overhead for the
desktop.

Users then have a free choice of Client and the Jabber world need only
create one transport for the personal server that can be distributed to all,
thus making those transports regularly updated and robust.

If we have a drag and drop 'personal server' with AIM, ICQ, Jabber and,
erm...MSN, that runs automatically and transparently in the background and
only when the Client is up, it would surely help the spread of Jabber.

The personal server can be manually started, but in future, clients can add
a hook to permit the spawning of the personal server.

Client designers can then focus on look-and-feel, skins, usability, thinness
and robustness and forget about having to handle multi-platform issues
which, frankly, each client is re-inventing the wheel in that regard.

My $0.02
Tim