[JDEV] Best way to drive Jabber adoption?

[Rachel Blackman]

> Are you looking for way of making a better user experience?  Different
> users want different things, and I still don't see how Jabber can tempt 
> users away from all-in-one chat programs like Fire or Trillian without
> putting in several times as many developer-hours of work.  That's not to
> say that those clients are better, only that they're better suited to
> some people's needs.

This is the key point, right here.  Jabber's transports have a very good,
beneficial feature for people who don't need more than basic messaging; the
ability to store your legacy IM userlists and account info on the server,
so that you only ever need to provide your jabber login and voila, you're
on everything.

This is countered by the fact that the average IM user, who you want to
spur to adopt Jabber, does not care about that as much.  Your average IM
user is probably using the system from one computer; my dad only ever logs
onto MSN Messenger from his own computer, so he wouldn't care about
multiple systems.  What he does care about is the ability to pull my
sister-in-law and I into group-chats on MSN, and the ability to send files
to us over it.  Jabber with an MSN transport...?  Even if I get him to go
'ooh, pretty' at Rhymbox, there's no way I'd get him onto Jabber if he
couldn't have working group-chats and file transfers to his existing
contacts.

The transports also have a significant flaw, namely that when you get 1,000
connections from a single IP, it's easy to block.  The personal-server
model works well enough, but it's still difficult to deal with.  In large
part because, as was pointed out, Jabber and the legacy systems are not a
1:1 mapping except for a very small subset of the overall IM featureset.
This is one place where I (perhaps with an obvious bias) do believe that
GAIM and Trillian have the right model; if Jabber spends time trying to
mutate itself to play catch-up in terms of making the transports work to
map higher-end features to the Jabber protocol, it's going to lose.
Realistically, Jabber /isn't/ the 'king of the hill' in terms of overall
end-user IM, and until someday when all IM standarizes, there will be
people who want their AIM, MSN, ICQ, Yahoo, etc. etc. all in one client.
And many of them will want the nifty features that the systems support.

So which is the better place to spend time-and-effort?  Figuring out how to
duplicate MSN's file transfer system and map it into Jabber...or finalizing
a Jabber file transfer method in the first place which gets around NAT and
everything automatically?  Deciphering the MSN voice chat system, or coming
up with a more comprehensive and featureful equivalent for Jabber?  And so
on.

The transports are a great idea, but they're not going to spur adoption for
general users, because in general it will feel like a step down.  They have
to feel like they're getting something more with Jabber, like it's a step
/up/ in order to adopt it, or to feel like it's a no-cost addition to their
existing IM experience.  As I've mentioned on JDEV, the long-term goal with
Jabber support in Trillian is to take every feature we support of every
other one of the mediums, and make it work under Jabber.  Even if this
means writing a hell of a lot of JEPs.  And don't underestimate the
importance of 'silly features' either; as was noted in other posts, one
person adopted Psi just because of the pretty little stars, and another
adopted Rhymbox because of the emoticons.  My dad won't switch off of MSN
Messenger because he likes the emoticons...

Anyway.  There's my take on it. :)

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