[jdev] a vision

[Justin Karneges]

On Wednesday 11 March 2009 18:57:36 Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
> Well, we have 400,000+ users of the jabber.org IM service. Shutting down
> the service seems unworkable. So the questions are:

Right, you wouldn't want to really remove it.  Instead:

> 1. Do we turn off registration for new users and redirect people elsewhere?

Yes.

> 2. Do we leave the jabber.org service as basic IM but nothing more?

I don't think there's anything wrong with improving the service for the people 
already using it, but it would be with the understanding that jabber.org is a 
very generic IM service, only good for testers, geeks, and anyone who already 
has an account there.  It would no longer be a place you'd send your mom.  
You'd send your mom to Google Talk, or any service competing on that level.

Feel free to spearhead such a competing service.  I didn't disagree with your 
vision.  In fact, this idea of a collaborative, open, world-wide service 
sounds incredible, if you can pull it off and maintain five nines. :)  I just 
don't think using the name "Jabber" is wise.  A giant service named Jabber, 
with a client named Jabber (JIM? :)) only adds naming confusion, and may be 
perceived by competitors as unfair (we want them to use the word "Jabber" as 
much as possible, and not be afraid of it).

I think you'd have just as much success calling the client+service "Andre-IM" 
(ahn-dream?), which could then be promoted as a Jabber-based Skype killer.  
This would be fair as well as easier to market.

> 3. Do we try to deploy the kinds of services that are needed in order
> for people to have a better experience? As far as I can see, those
> services are SOCKS5 and TURN relays for file transfer and voice/video.
> But we can't deploy just one of those (it would be overloaded) so we
> need to deploy them more widely -- perhaps just Europe and North America
> to start, but eventually in many locations so that people can use local
> relays everywhere.

I don't think it can hurt to do this, if the resources are there.

-Justin