[JDEV] Best way to drive Jabber adoption?

[Bart van Bragt]

> 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.

Shouldn't this be the point in all client projects? Trying to make a 
user centered product? IMO obscuring the complexity of Jabber is a given 
in anything that users should use. Even in something that admins should 
use. The question should be what the user expects/wants to see, not 
what's the easiest to implement protocol-wise. At least that's how it 
should be.

IMO most Jabber clients are a perfect example of a product that's 
created by techies, something that my lecturers (at the university) are 
warning us about.. Constantly :D

I think it's good for the devs to realise that Jabber adoption is 
increasing, fast.. It would also be good to realise that gaining a 
larger userbase of non-technies is a GoodThing(tm) :D It will help 
Jabber, it will make your work worthwile (IMO). For me the large 
userbase is a reason that I still enjoy working on phpBB a lot ;)

Users want something that looks good so I think it would be great if the 
client devs try to find someone that's good in the graphics/UI side of 
the story. In the case of phpBB we gained a LOT from our subSilver theme 
that was created by a graphics artist. He doesn't know much about PHP 
but he does know how to make something visually appealing and 
userfriendly... As I already said on the psi mailinglist, users don't 
care much about the advanced permission system, the ability to create 
usergroups, the fulltext search, etc, etc. Most of them care about the 
nice default theme and the cute smileys :\ Not something easy to 
understand for a lot of devs (including myself :D) but it's how things 
work in userland :\

Another example; a friend of mine was watching me use Psi and she asked 
me if she could use that too. She really liked the cute little stars in 
front of the contacts... :D Do you think she cares about the fact that 
Jabber is using a distributed network? That it uses XML? That it's easy 
to extend/modify? Nope, not really :D She liked the cute stars :D


Regarding the other posts about the client side transport servers... I 
don't think that's a good idea. IMO we should focus on Jabber, not on 
perfect interoperability. Most of the people that I know don't use voice 
chat/file transfer and other advanced features of ICQ/MSNM, so IMO it 
wuold already be great if we had a stable set of transports for the big 
four.. If people want perfect interoperability they should go for 
Trillian or Gaim IMO.

But indeed, the transports need quite some work. I'm running my own 
transports now and that seems to be working quite a bit better than the 
transports I used on a public server. But still I experience quite a few 
quirks :\ That's the only reason why I haven't converted my girlfriend 
and other friends yet... (but I guess my GF will just keep using 
Trillian Pro now Jabber is coming to Trillian :D).

Hmm, maybe we could push the free Trillian as the recommended client to 
new users when (if?) that version supports Jabber? :D

Cheers,

BartVB