[jdev] a vision

[Ernest Nova]

It is unlikely that jabber.org (as a community run effort) could turn into a consumer service that could take on Skype or Gtalk - and perhaps that shouldn't be its purpose.

If the intent is to support XMPP - then there is a consumer service that uses XMPP she could use- GTalk. There may be other reasons for her to use other Google services.

As previously noted: Consumers vote for functionality, not standards. 

This is not to say a commercial service based on XMPP wont be viable - but just to keep up with the state of the art it would need audio, video, document sharing, micro blogging and other integrated services before your every day user would download yet another IM client. Yes - there are several highly functional XMPP clients out there - but only us XMPP geeks could possibly love them.

My sense is that the best use for a jabber.org service would be a sandbox for developers to expose unique features (say pub/sub, persistent chat), interesting adaptations like Chesspark, and other skunk works projects. 

This exposition will encourage other developers to use XMPP in their product/service offerings and XMPP would just become embedded everywhere - which is the larger goal.

My 2 jabbers worth.


--- On Wed, 3/11/09, Dirk Meyer <dmeyer at tzi.de> wrote:


We should be prepared to answer the question why Jabber? My sister has a
Skype account and her friends also have one. Why should she download
this Jabber thing? Don't answer with freedom and open -- that has no
meaning for the average user.


Dirk