[JDEV] Best way to drive Jabber adoption?

[Rachel Blackman]

> That's a good example of a localised portal. But it will be hard to 
> offer serverside tranports for an ISP. Apart from the instability, they 
> make themselves a target for blocks and maybe even legal action from 
> AOL. On top of that they'll have to put up with question from users 
> about why the groupchat/filetransfer/etc. doesn't work. They'd be 
> better off I think, hacking GAIM a bit to give it a nice skin with 
> their company logo and such. Or some agreement with Trillian to give 
> away a version with their skin. 

*innocent whistling* *gazes skywards*

Actually, all goofing around aside, what would be really cool to see is if
someone put together a comprehensive communications server for ISPs. 

Something that uses a single user database and provides (as an example)
IMAP/POP3 mail access, web-mail access, mail filtering, user-run mailing
lists, NNTP, Jabber, etc.  A nice, comprehensive package like that --
especially if it did things like let a user run, say, five personal mailing
lists without sysadmin interference, and maybe even exported those mailing
lists as newsgroups on the NNTP server -- would be very attractive to ISPs,
and the Jabber portion included would therefore encourage Jabber adoption.

The beauty of this is that then your e-mail and Jabber addresses would be
the same (one less address/name for people to remember), you could do
things like set up on the mailserver rules for your account 'if I get mail
matching <x> rules, I want to be notified by Jabber' and so on.  ISP system
maintenance announcements could be targeted via Jabber and e-mail to
specific customers (if Speakeasy ever offers a service to IM me when
there's going to be system maintenance, I will sign up in a heartbeat), all
sorts of stuff.

Right now, Jabber's not as easy to get into as just signing up for an AOL
screen-name.  A lot of ISPs, if they do offer Jabber, don't make it readily
apparent.  Making it possible for ISPs to provide Jabber and, more
important, to provide Jabber in some way that gives significant value to
the end customer (maybe offer automated tech support over Jabber?) is going
to be one of the major steps in encouraging adoption.

> Once you have a fair slice of the pie, you can compete on features. 
> Then it also get's more attractive for both commercial and non-
> commercial entities to offer jabber-based services. (For examplee, I 
> can imagine one day Trillian will offer Jabber-acounts for a small fee, 
> that integrate with the rest of their own communities (forums and 
> such)). 

*whimpers softly*  Our bandwidth bills are bad enough as it is...!  But
yes, that's been discussed as a future possibility, a trillian.cc Jabber
server at some point for Pro users.

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