[JDEV] Best way to drive Jabber adoption?

[Tijl Houtbeckers]

Rachel Blackman <rcb at ceruleanstudios.com> wrote on 14-6-2003 20:03:04:
>
>> 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.

Exactly.. I agree with Rachel.

Jabber Transports are for people like me. I want to use Jabber (and I 
know why), and I like Jabber clients. I want as many contacts on my 
list as possible to be jabber contacts. But I still know many people 
that use only ICQ or MSN. This way I can still send them messages.  So 
the filetransfer doesn't work.. that's ok because I know why I want to 
use Jabber. 

The Trillian (and GAIM, more or less) route is a different one. They 
aim to be as compatible as possible with systems like MSN, they don't 
depend on crashy transports to be up or down. Adding decent Jabber 
functionality to those clients won't bring Jabber world domination 
before the end of the week. But it does mean that every time you, the 
Jabber user, want to add a Trillian or GAIM user to your list, you 
won't have to use your MSN transport, or ICQ transport etc. Because I 
don't think you'll have a hard time convincing users of Trillian to 
make an account somewhere so you can add them. They don't loose any 
functionality with it. 

This also exposes the users of Trillian to the functionality of Jabber. 
If we can make that Jabber-functionality better as the competition 
(many aspects on wich we can do this), maybe the next time that 
Trillian user will add another Trillian user, they'll choose to use 
Jabber as the transport-layer, instead of MSN/ICQ/etc. bringing yet 
another user onto the network. This will only make it easyer for people 
such as many here, that want to switch completly and eventually, maybe 
even switch off those transports. If someone you want to add then still 
has a lot of contacts on MSN, you can always tell them to switch to 
Trillain/GAIM. 

You don't need one big portal for this. We'll need good Jabber servers 
ofcourse. I don't think portals are a bad idea but personally I believe 
more in local portals. Just call it the polish model ;) Everyone who 
will "switch on" a Trillian user onto the Jabber network will know a 
server what server is good for that Trillian user (they use it 
themselves ofcourse). 

In the end, I think a lot user will switch to using Jabber, at least 
alongside other networks, wich will make things a lot easyer for those 
of us that want to use a Jabber client that does not include client-
side MSN/ICQ/etc. implementations like Trillian. Ofcourse, users of 
such messengers still have a bigger reach than Jabber-only messengers, 
but that's the whole idea behind such messengers. 

Jabber will never "win" in a marketing battle, nor can we use an OS 
monopoly to force our client on users. But with a mix of good servers, 
local portals, and just as critically, decent support for Jabber in the 
multi-protocol clients, we can reach a "critical" mass, where 
competition will be more on features and possibilities. And I think we 
*all* agree that Jabber with it's advantage of being an open standard 
that is open for use can have a big lead on the competion when it comes 
to that. 


-- 
Tijl Houtbeckers
Software Engineer @ Splendo
The Netherlands