[JDEV] Best way to drive Jabber adoption?

[Timothy Carpenter]

Firstly, apologies for not including segments. <thread count exceeded> ;-)

What I am suggesting is not about altering how all people use Jabber, but to
get Jabber more widely adopted!

I believe clients such as Fire have the right idea (I too want one UI), but
they seem to use an all-in-one multi-transport client approach (and alas I
do not like their ergonomics).

I am suggesting to split into Client + multi-transport personal server. Such
a server can still be maintained by a centralised pool of developers many
orders of magnitude greater than any Client ever could.

It does not stop people using centralised or departmental servers should
they so wish and I have never suggested that it should. The same transports
will be used and those servers would benefit from work done on zero conf.

However, using centralised/departmental servers means that you need to
direct all your IM traffic through them so they on-pass to the various
transports. I am only considering the big four - MSN, Yahoo, ICQ and AIM.

Thus, for the general public, you need to get everyone to sign up to remote
Jabber servers.

WRONG.

People will not like this. *I* do not  like this! - it is "Redmond-think".
(the world domination idea)

Jabber is surely about an open technology not a single IM service provider?

A Jabber multi-transport personal server can be put out there as a
ready-to-go solution for Joe/Jane Public who connects, say, just to ICQ and
MSN without central Jabber servers being involved. They are free to choose
their Jabber Client or the one bundled.

Some may feel this is a backward step.

I cannot disagree more. Giving out such a capability gets the technology out
onto desktops - open and platform neutral.

Once the desktops are out there people will be using Jabber as their core
enabler (many without knowing it)  other companies who want to tap into this
market only need to provide a Jabber-based product to reach out to this
population or use the zero conf messaging layer. The real power in IM is not
Chat or MU, it is in broad messaging and transaction processing.

Of course it would need the transport issue to be sorted - but this needs
sorting ANYWAY. What better way to sort it than bundle it as a personal
server version for people to try, thrash and debug? Zero conf can come in
parallel.

If Jabber intends to be big, and I wish it so, then it needs to DROP the
idea that other transports are 'legacy systems' and accept that they will be
around indefinitely.

That thought is techie speak, not marketing, and we are discussing an issue
of market penetration here which, as others have said, does not need to be
too elegant technically but must attend to user sensibilities (pretty
stars), concerns (no Big Brother) and LAZINESS (single UI) - a key human
driver for adoption.

As for multiple targets - we are not talking about a vast number here. What
is needed is XP, W2000 OSX and W98 to get a pretty vast population.  People
running Unix/ Linux are quite capable of tinkering their way around.

Sorry for a long reply...i am trying to avoid 3 consecutive and overlapping
responses! 8-)

Tim