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Jabber As The Coming IM Standard?
deran9ed writes: "Rocky Mountain News just posted an decent article regarding Jabber. "That makes Jabber the "best candidate for becoming the de facto standard" of the instant-messaging industry, Kobielus said, in much the same way Linux has been to the Unix operating system and Apache has been to Web servers." Article is written rather well for a change with comments on concerns of companies, and their employees use of other IM protocols (AIM, Yahoo), a brief history of Jabber, and its authors, etc. Read on" One thing's for sure -- AOL hasn't made any friends by periodically kicking off all non-official clients from AIM, and companies would like to know that won't happen to them with a custom client.
(Yes, I just finished reading Cryptonomicon)
They're successful. We should be happy for them. But instead, we're moaning about how we want a piece of the pie. Well it's their pie!
I have seen the face of tyranny. Tyranny is when a man cannot sleep at night for fear that ruffians will set fire to his cottage and loot his stables. That's what's happening to AOL as we speak: freeloaders are claiming that they get to use AOL's servers for free just because they want to! Imagine the nerve!
In Sicily, they call it a mafia. In Ireland, it's parliament. But in the United States of America, it's free software? Free software is supposed to be about giving away your property as you see fit, not stealing others' property on your own behalf.
Jabber cannot be allowed to discredit free software. We must cut the cancer out at its roots, lest it poison the entire apple tree. If it's freedom that people want, then it's freedom they shall get in all its righteous fury.
Make no mistake about it: if this can happen to AOL, then it can happen to you. No one is safe in a world where the blackguards run free through the countryside raping and pillaging. Today it's Virginia. Tomorrow, it could be your backyard.
Don't say I didn't warn you.
--
While this may only be minimally related to the what LL says, here's a "for what it's worth": Stairways Software (now Interarchy, a putrid shadow of its former self) had a now-dead product called Combadge that used existing e-mail infrastructure as the basis for an instant messaging system. It was never hyped very well, was limited to the Mac and was written by Stairways's most incompetent programmer (Andrew Tomazos), but it did show potential.
Wrong. AOL turned on their checking for AOL clients and folks have updated the Jabber AIM transport to respond correctly to those checks
(by allowing the user/implementer of the server to give the server access to a copy of the Windows executable). So it can still AIM, just not throught the Jabber.com gateway. Download the server, set your own server up. Then you can go through that to AIM.
"You know you want me baby!" - Crow T Robot
This story links to jabber.com (which is fine) but if you're looking for the open source project you might want to hit jabber.org. The open source project is where it all started, and jabber.com is just one of the many commercial efforts working to help jabber be a better tool for the business world and enterprises.
We're still a young project and have many hurdles to leap yet, so if you bump into anything you'd like to see improved with jabber, it's open source and we welcome any/all assistance :)
RFC1459 specifies a cross platform instant messaging protocol. Included is the ability to send/receive files, create chat groups, and "instant message" another user directly. It's really cool. Maybe these newbies should try it sometime and quit reinventing the wheel. What's next on your drawing board? A platform independent way of sending text and graphics over a packet switched network where users click on "links" to go to other "pages"? ;-)
As opposed to your email, where, if your server goes down.. Umm, And if their server is down.. Umm.. 8-P
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
Nope, not even close. IRC is a chat network. There is no such thing as presence notification, etc, which are pretty much required for instant messaging.
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
Well, there are a few requirements to being considered Instant Messaging. The first requirment is that of an entity. In order for an entity to communicate in realtime with another entity, they must exist, and be reserved and enforced by the protocol itself. None of the original IRC specifications came even close to this requirement. Not just authentication, but the ownership of an entity, to be reserved exclusivly for a given party, and enforced server network wide.
Yes, I can give you that IRC is an example of an rudimentary IM system. There are many examples of IM systems. But it was not meant, nor was it designed, for IM. It was designed and continues to work as an open 'groupchat' implementation. It was build around a subscription model, in that users subscribe to a given 'channel'. While this gives the appearence of Instant Messaging, its more like 'Instant Chatroom'. Standard SMTP email systems could also serve as an IM system, simply by using SMTP email headers, and allow servers to translate headers to be used for presence.
And yes, I do expect ICQ to be able to see AIM, which is specifically the way the Jabber network works. By use an open namespace, any given system can be segmented simply by a URL. This means that an entire closed namespace can be represented by one open namespace. Yes, you still need to have an account in that closed namespace, but that is a compromise due to the limitations of the external systems.
And I'm not downplaying IRC at all. Jabber specifically includes a transport that gateways jabber users to IRC servers. This was one of the very first transports, and was the original groupchat interface used before the transports for groupchat had been written.
IRC has its place. But its not for user notification and instant messaging.
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
Well semantically speaking... Linux isn't even strictly POSIX-compliant. It makes a good attempt, but it's not 100% and never been certified.
Otherwise I agree that GNU/Linux is not UNIX.
In Gabber: Services -> New blank message... and give your own address as recipient. Works fine. I don't know how it works in other Jabber clients, but the point is, yes, you can IM yourself! =)
Check out:
There are others, but these are the 2 best I've found. I seem to prefer licq, but that's a personal preference. YMMV.
It's been almost a decade since the last holdouts (Prodigy, MSN, AOL, etc... remember when they weren't just expensive ISPs?) figured out that making email for the entire world dependent on a single server farm might be a bad idea... or at least, at the time I'd assumed that they had figured it out. Now I realize that they were forced to accept internet email standards because no single one of them controlled a majority of the market, and each of them dreams of catching the next big technology and entrapping it on their own LAN. My email address is roystgnr@rice.edu; why should my instant messaging address be in a flat namespace (AIM, pre-internet AOL email), or god forbid even a flat numerical namespace (ICQ, pre-internet compuserve email)!?
Does managing a technical company kill your long term memory?
And you still feel like encryption is worth something? I thought the book did a fine job of pointing out the futility of using crypto.
** Martin
In practice UDP is not actually extremely scalable unless you implement your own congestion control.
DNA just wants to be free...
I don't know if this has been mentioned yet, but I have a clue as to why AOL doesn't allow other clients.
First. The network that RUNS AIM is actually pretty complex. You can't count on other clients from maybe making mistakes in messaging formats that might really mess up something or perhaps writing a client that could actually do some harm. The best that AOL can do is to keep these possible threats of their network is to keep them from connecting.
Second.
ADS. Aol puts em in their AIM client. Now if you don't have to use their client to IM then you don't have to look at their ads. I have no problem with looks at the ads it's just I don't like having to look at the ads of 3-4 IM's clients at once.
Just my humble opinion....
ZiN
-ZiN-
Usenet and email are decentralized and asynchronous. When you're sending email or posting to Usenet, nothing is checking to see if the recipients are logged in.
With instant messaging, you can't get around the thing that distinguishes real-time chat from email: the real-time status monitoring. When you log in to a real-time chat system, you need to announce your presence to a central hub that reports your status to the other users who need to see your status. You can't do that with a decentralized system, at least not one with more than a couple thousand concurrent users. Multi-hop referrals or separate regional or ISP hubs each with their own members' login status are far too slow and bandwidth-intensive to work on a large scale.
A useful public instant-messaging system covering countries with tens of millions of people and thus hundreds of thousands to millions of concurrent users needs that central hub; otherwise your client is spending all of its time querying and processing data from any number of far-flung regional hubs.
Fine, Jabber has a faint outside chance of becoming a standard protocol for private instant-messaging systems, and might eventually compete well with things like Lotus Sametime and Microsoft's conferencing server.
Granted, this isn't all that likely since both Microsoft and Lotus can already integrate their instant messaging well with H.323 videoconferencing and with T.120 application-sharing and whiteboarding tools, and seamlessly tie in to directory services (not just for authentication) in ways that also make it fairly simple to link companies' and organizations' realtime messaging/collaboration together without relaying each other's messages. Fact is, Jabber is a good 2 or 3 years behind its competitors in the intranet space in terms of features. They're even miles behind the ICQ Groupware server.
As far as public instant-messaging goes, it wouldn't be fair to say Jabber has no chance of catching on. But those chances are slim. Let's say that for some reason it does. Who is going to run and pay for the giant Jabber servers sitting in the middle of everything? An instant messaging system that can support millions of concurrent users will not run on a single donated 4-processor box running Postgres or MySQL. It won't run on two. It's going to take a server farm or two with millions of dollars in hardware, millions of dollars in commercial database licenses, and millions of dollars in engineers' salaries to tend to it. Please remember that while the messaging itself is peer to peer, the login and buddy-status monitoring services are not.
How, exactly, is this going to be paid for if the clients are open-sourced, access to the servers is unrestricted, and advertising can be blocked? A tip jar?
Ive been digging around a bit, looking for an ICQ clone for Linux, and the ones Ive found so far are mostly crap Java applets/applications. Is there a fairly stable, decent quality ICQ clone for Linux?
In 1st grade.
(For those confused, JabberIM is the Jabber client available from Jabber.com. It is one of many Jabber clients available.)
:) Check this out:
Most of your complaints can be fixed in the Preferences dialog.
>* Concurrent connection: If I open two JabberIM
>on different machines, they will battle for the
>control of the connection!
To differentiate between connections, the clients need to have different "resources." You probably didn't set one of your instances to have a different resource, so they are trying to fight over the same resource ("JabberIM" by default). Jabber will happily let you use as many connections as you want at once.. as long as each client has unique resources.
>* Or the messages pop and hide my work, or I
>never see them... I can't wait a few seconds
>before reading the mail like I was used to on ICQ
>and MSN.
>* If a new user send me a message while I write
>to the other, the new window will capture my
>keystroke. Very annoying when you say : "I love
>you!".
Both of these can be fixed with a quick trip to your Preferences. Simply tell it to not gain focus for new messages.
GNU/Linux isn't UNIX and doesn't claim to be UNIX
GNU's NOT UNIX was intended to be a joke. GNU only claims to not be "UNIX(tm)" to the extent that claiming to be Unix would get them sued. Looks like a DUCK(tm), walks like a DUCK(tm), quacks like a DUCK(tm) - it's a Duck.
The word "Unix" has been virtually completely disassociated with the tradename "UNIX" in the vernacular. That's why OpenVMS is UNIX, and FreeBSD is "real Unix", and Linux is a "Unix-like system", and UNIX System V Release 4 is "SCO UNIXWare", and I can make xeroxes from a Canon copier, and there's no congantive dissonance involved.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
If Jabber actually had a client that was easy to install and use, this would be good news. But every time myself or my wife have tried to get a Jabber client of any stripe to work (keep in mind, I've had about 14 years of Unix experience, and also done home Windows maintenance for most of that time) IT HAS FAILED UTTERLY. I'm sticking with ICQ until Jabber folks can actually produce useable software.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
1) Make jabber not suck.
2) Make jabber clients not suck.
I mean, look at the options. Gabber, which is horribly unstable and has awful trouble building on non-linux systems, Jarl, which is good but not too current, WinJab, which is way ugly but featureful, and JabberIM, which is simple but lacks functionality. It's very hard for programmers to take full advantage of jabber, since the full protocol is horribly documented, and the server itself is in pretty poor shape as far as transports are concerned.
I hear a lot of talk about jabber, but I see very little to back it up. I've used it periodically, even to the exclusion of better free clients (gaim, supports all the protocols jabber does but actually works), but the quality of the transports and the complete lack of portability of the transports and server are very frustrating. I even tried to write my own client, but ran into the documentation roadblock myself, and confirmed the problem with authors of other jabber clients.
Jabber has great potential, but it needs a LOT of work to realize it, and I think the articles in OSS rags touting it as some kind of IM panacea do more harm than good.
-lx
But, calling it an industry standard is probably taking that a bit too far.
Says who? Linux is shipping on more servers than any other UNIX variant. More software is being developed on Linux than on any other UNIX variant.
No, it's not the standard PC platform, but the previous comment doesn't indicate that it was... He just said that Linux is the industry standard UNIX. It may not be the most powerful or mature, but from a lot of people's point of view, it's the standard.
See my earlier post in this thread.
The effort fragmented, and the working group rewrote its charter to limit its purpose to defining requirements. Their RFC's about the Common Profile for Instant Messaging (CPIM) have been published, and they should be closing down soon. The IETF instant messaging effort is now mainly split into two camps with subtly different aims.
The SIMPLE working group is adapting the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) to serve the traditional purpose of instant messaging.
The APEX working group is developing a BEEP profile to serve as a general-purpose, low-latency, Internet-scale application messaging and presence protocol.
Both are good ideas, and neither one is enough by itself. The SIMPLE group is likely to get something up and workable quickly, but it won't be all things to all people. The APEX group, on the other hand, may take longer, but it is doing some remarkably good work and there is already a fair amount of BEEP implementation code published under a BSD license at sourceforge. See the new BEEP Home Page for the juiciest news.
jhw
The IETF is in the process of proposing not one but two standard protocols for "instant messaging" applications. (Why two? It's a long story, and it isn't over.) I recommend reviewing the charters of the APEX and SIMPLE working groups, as well as the appropriate drafts.
RFC 2778 and RFC 2779 are good background information too.
It seems to me that the direction the Jabber project should take is to consider both of these protocols to be "transports" and, er-- assimilate them. Yeah... that's the ticket.
jhw
The Jabber protocol is cool not because of interoperability but because they've whipped out a pretty fast XML router. Jabber is as complex (actually less so) then Gnutella and look at how popular Gnutella is getting with the mom and pop crowd. The protocol is fairly basic and easy to work with and allows you to add features onto it later. Jabber is a good framework to build on rather than a release product like AIM. Jabber will make a big splash as soon as someone puts all the good ideas into one easy to use package.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
What in the holiest of holy fucks are you talking about? Did I not say Jabber is an XMl router? There are plenty of limits with what you can do with it, the fact that it's XML makes little difference. I could do everything Jabber does with a simple IRC server. Like I fucking said, Jabber is a framework someone can easily put to their own use, the key to its success will be someone putting it to a very popular and profitable use. All you've done is name a few of the things you can do with an XML router. Congratulations jackass.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I hate to be nit picky like this, but shouldn't that be third millenium? 1-1000= 1st, 1001-2000= 2nd, 2001-3000= 3rd
More likely Jabber will go the way of QDOS and PowerPoint.. it will be *ahem* acquired and merged into MSnN by Redmond..
"You enjoy myself!" - Trey Anastasio
And I quote..."Think about it," Durand said. "This is like the opportunity to commercialize e-mail, but bigger." I can see it now, pop-up ads from your instant messaging client! How sweet is that? I worked for the parent company two years ago and everything they touch turns to shit. Jeremie Miller should never have gotten into bed with these bozos. I hope the opensource project can make it though.
-- Infatuated with the fact that they can, software developers usually don't stop to think if they should.
Jabber also runs on Solaris 2.7 and 8 and FreeBSD.
And you can make yourself a friend so that you'll always know when you're online!
Messages sent to you just come right back. No chit chat though! <sigh>
Craig.
Now, I'm a full convert on the usefulness of Linux. I've got it running on two different platforms in my house right now. But, calling it an industry standard is probably taking that a bit too far.
... Linux is becoming a powerhouse on the server!!
Huh? Besides Linux being the most widely used Unix, it has the most market share of an Unix. Plus, all the commercial Unix vendors are adopting technology from the Linux community. Solaris, for instance, can run Linux binaries. HP, Sun, IBM, and other commercial Unix vendors have created the GNOME foundation and are adopting GNOME as their standard desktops.
Linux is NOT the standard desktop operating system, but it is THE standard Unix variant. And it is now #2 in server sales, next only to Windows NT/2000. Linux server sales, in fact, have eaten into Microsoft's server OS sales, making it a real challenger to Microsoft on the server platform. Get with it
My journal has hot
Now, I'm a full convert on the usefulness of Linux. I've got it running on two different platforms in my house right now. But, calling it an industry standard is probably taking that a bit too far.
It may become a defacto standard one day, but in my opinion we're still quite a way off (and Linux has a lot of growing up to do) before we reach that point.
{{donning fire-retardant clothing}}
--Mid
- - mail transfer agent (MTA);
- - mail delivery agent (MDA); and
- - mail user agent (MUA).
Because the three components are somehwat independent and substitutable (e.g. sendmail/qmail, pine/elm/eudora) different palyers can upgrade without breaking some critical day-to-day use. Looking at the Jabber, it tries to be the polygot of IMs which while laudable, does make it a little unwieldly to offer alternatives and competition in the form of low barriers to entry tis'good (TM). For example, stuff like Elvin which is content-based messaging looks intriguing.Perhaps some thought should be given to aligning the components in an analogous fashion. Has someone looked into comparison of the key attributes of the different IM system to see whether a similar structure could be nominated? For example, I would hazard
In fact spliting channels into a separate session control and others is what is suggested by BXXP framework.
LL
It would be nice to hear your definition of Instant Messaging, otherwise any discussion on whether IRC fullfills it or not is jsut empty lip-slapping.
However, I feel I have to remark that a primitive presence-protocol was defined in the RFC 1459, May 1993, "The ISON command was implemented to provide a quick and efficient means to get a response about whether a given nickname was currently on IRC." This is a polling presence-mechanism, and was extended in 1995 to allow more fine-grianed identification. On October 1997, the increase in user-counts and decrease in memory-prices led to the official roll-out of the WATCH system, which implements passive presence notification, on DALnet IRC network. This extension has since then been adopted by most major IRC networks and clients.
I personally consider IM just a subset of chat/IRC. Now I'm fully aware IRC protocol has significant problems with authenticiation (To some degree solved by development and integration of Services around 1997), segmentation of the IRC community (But you don't expect ICQ presence to work on AIM etc. do you?) and scaling. However, it yet remains to be seen what a major company running a centralized server-farm for IRC could've accomplished; most of IRC's scaling-problems are due to decentralization using 1980's architecture and assumptions.
However, I think the kind of single-eyed software-patriotism as this thread suggests is only harmful to the open-source movement as a whole. It wasn't even automatically clear that IRC was under an open-source license, and there was a strong movement to hold it under a properitary license. Luckily, perhaps, open-source won then - but had they known many in the open-source movement would later disown and ignore this important pioneer, I think they'd thought twice about it.
-Donwulff
Well, it's getting a bit off-topic from the original discussion...
;)
But still I can't help but remark that messaging between "entities", that is nicks and nick-lists was the initial application of IRC (Which was built as a more convenient replacement of talk). The subscription channels, first as numbers and then as the present named channels, appeared only much later. There are still many people who never join channels, just wait for people on their notify-lists to pop up or the other way around.
I'm not sure what you mean by "reserved and enforced by the protocol itself". IRC protocol is pretty militant about that, and has had support for password-protected logins back from day one as it were. Persistence of entities is a problem that was solved by the different services-systems half a decade ago.
I'm not saying IRC is the best protocol out there and a model for the future of Instant Messaging, but it is very hard to find examples of anything that all present Instant Messagign systems do that IRC didn't do already five years back - including crashing, ofcourse
And yes, SMTP could've served as IM as well, had somebody written up an aplication to broker out presence requests and notifications and guaranteed real-time delivery, but nobody did.
-Donwulff (And let's not even talk about, er, talk...)
If you're looking for little ASCII diagrams of the relationships between PRINCIPALs, SENDER UAs, INSTANT INBOXes etc, it's the place to be!
Although this may be true of a service system, this is not true of Jabber. The real power lies in the number of servers that are out there. Unfortunately we haven't done the best job of protraying the idea of having your own server, or a server at your ISP rather than using the existing public ones. As the number of servers increases we can expect to see the supposed "user count" jump up and up suddenly, especially if corporations proxy out their users. But there is really no way to tell the user count because the server is available and people/corporations could be using it internally so their IM traffic stays internal and protected (logged?). Just food for thought, plus we're slowly forming our next generation plans that can begin to tear away the IM/chat stereotype from Jabber and begin to let it flourish as a true real time communication infrastructure.
Hah, I drew a picture after one of our developer meetings about that, but it's not going to happen, ever. We're direct competition to Hailstorm, and there is no way to kill the source that is out there so what are they going to do? Fight us through other means I'm sure, but otherwise continue to try and move faster than us. I don't see that happening with corporate weight though.
I agree that documentation is our weakest point, but major steps are being taken to work on that. I wouldn't necessarily classify it as a lack of documentation, rather a lack of unified documentation. Recently there have been some great docs put together, but they don't get merged into larger finished docs. Hopefully in the next few weeks docs can beging to flourish more fully.
Is email too complex? If your JID were the exact same as your email address would it be too complex? I don't see why that makes the system too complex, especially if it allows for a unified ID. Your other issues seem to be UI issues that are also dependant on preferences (check out the force msg type options in Gabber).
Which attack and anger are you talking about? One of the main reasons I've seen people deploy Jabber and throw spite towards AIM is security. The companies need to be able to control their users actions to some extent and having the messages float around on some other network doesn't help that very much. A Jabber server can be configured to only allow internal usage, and then possibly proxy traffic to the outside world in a concentrated and controlled manner. Even more so components could be built to log all traffic and store it in a safe and encrypted manner. This would be quite a chore of packet sniffing a network and reconstructing to do this if you let your users have access to the AIM network. Even more so if you then let users have access to any network they want.
is not advanced by clients like Jabber. Much the opposite, actually. They have a ways to go yet.
IBM uses Lotus Sametime internally, and you can bet it's encrypted. But it's easy to use daily.
Other IBM/Lotus customers also can use Sametime securely, within their business. But it doesn't do AIM, Jabber, etc., at least not yet...
What's not implemented yet is a universal chat facility that discriminates between internal versus external conversations, I so openly admit.
RoninM pointed out that the network / servers AOL runs AIM on belongs to AOL -- good point. And since I posted that little note about "not making any friends," maybe I left the impression that I am mad or indignant that AOL once in a while implements built-in authentication tricks to get rid of unofficial clients. And I am -- a little bit, sometimes;) -- when I let myself.
... company or school colors, built in links to local documents or databases, specialized phone directory, etc etc.)
But in fact, I basically agree with RoninM that as the owner of the network, AOL has no obligation to let other people ride free on the servers that AOL folks thought of and put in place as an (indirect) money maker. Annoying that some very cool clients are kicked off every few months, but nothing immoral, illegal or fattening about it -- it's sort of like if a restaurant stops giving out free ice cream.
However, this is why I say that businesses who want to use IM services might like Jabber / other Free / Open Source project as the basis for their internal msg services, both client *and* server.
No one, not even the "legitimate owner" (because under Free licenses, the right to use is explicitly granted) can take it back from them at some arbitrary future point then.
(Also, I can see people liking open source IM clients because they can be customized heavily to match an organization
Just thoughts,
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
My sole reason for installing Jabber is to get a low userID in case it becomes popular later :)
:(
It seems that it will let me continue to communicate with my current ICQ list via my current ICQ number --- so byebye ICQ.
Hmm, I see it doesn't have userID numbers
oh well, already got it now, might as well keep it
Jabber is an ok client, but like people have posted already - it does have a problem with frequent disconnections. The good thing about aim is that aol has to answer to paying costumers and we aim users get to tag along just for the price of looking couple ads on the buddy list window (you can hack that out?!?!?! shhhhh!!!!) The worst thing about aim is that it's not the best client out there that uses the oscar/toc protocol. I personally prefer that 'penguin pimpin IM clone' that the cool people call Gaim mostly because of the tabbed conversation windows It's their servers, so I can't blame them if they're disconnected clients that use their clock cycles but don't display their ads, but AOL could actually (put on rose colored glasses....now!) win a few hearts if they would allow 3rd parties to create clients that would could connect using oscar (toc works in gaim I believe) if they displayed the small ads. (hey eurdora and opera are adware, but they rock) - I'll step away from the soapbox now, but AOL really needs to do something along the lines of opening up their servers/protocol before the gov't has something to say about a supposed Instant Messaging monopoly. The only other solution would be someone like Jabber, but with such frequent d/c as it stands now, what would it be like if they had 30 million users like aol has?
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur
Coincidentally, a piece I wrote for Newsforge about this very topic just went live in time for this story: http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=01/04/16/1 931237
Can your IM do this?
Too bad no one's heard of it.
My ICQ# is in the 200,000's.
When I started using ICQ, nobody else had heard of it either.
Amazing what's happened the past few years, eh?
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
I looked at jabber, much architectural work there.
:-)
But in the end too complex to hack on, and even to
get it up and running fast. Heck, I am a system admin
and used to hack things around, but could not get
the conferencing to work in a sane way.
Too much options and configurability prevents thing
from working.
Also I don't want complex things in an IM-server like:
* TCP socket, slow to connect and does not scale well
* XML parser - lots of code I don't want attach to internet -
small is beautiful and more secure.
* covering all bases - no I don't want that!
I want to use the tools I am used to and like.
* Security is a hack, and SSL does not work with UDP.
I hacked something together this weekend,
a IM system using UDP for scalability and
GnuPG for security. It is almost usable
look here
what makes Jabber the not-so-best candidate is lack of users. Users are what make something the facto standard, and even though Jabber may not be proprietary like the others, unless they figure out a way to increase their user base (preferably at the expense of the others'), they will not become the de facto standard.
Whether they become an official standard is a different issue -- maybe that's what they meant. Whether that will help them is another issue still.
-Puk
I am very impressed with PAA (Window only but..). It is a IM here in Japan that has a multitude of options including a variety of plugins that allow interoperability with other IMs and for mail notification with many major mail services. It lets you know who else is viewing the same site (ie. 4 users at slashdot.org) It supports double-byte and single-byte text. It has skins and on and on. I am very impressed with it so far.
e t_ eng537a.exe
There is an English version available as well.
For DL go to:
http://www.paa.ne.jp/download/
Direct DL of English version:
http://www.paa.ne.jp/messenger/download3.0/tryn
BTW, Jabber doesn't work on Japanese Win98. Well, it works, but when you try to communicate, it garbles your alphanumericals. (Other English IMs have no problem with this.)
And this is different from today's IM networks how? Let's see, I've got ICQ for my friends, AIM for my sister, Netmeeting for my coworkers....
ÕÕ
ÕÕ
Hold your horses, buddy. It's not like Slahdot wrote the article, they just pointed it out.
Do I really need to write this? They get so many submissions that they can essentially bias the news by selecting submissions that fit their bias. I'm not saying that there is a Pro-VALinux bias showing (infact I suspect the opposite), but there is a lot of room for editorial conflict of interest here.
Either way, surely Slashdot is allowed to report on things related to VA Linux?
Yes, but it's nice if they inform us of a possible conflict of interest, even if it is minor. Otherwise you just can't trust 'em. Would you trust a ABC News report about how great the new Disneyland ride is????
-rt-
-rt-
** Evil Canadians are taking over the world. Learn about the conspiracy
leaked memo cut out the Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (please).
/. was out of line in this case (and in general)? No, and I said that, and I'm certainly not making any specific accusation. But I do fear unchecked bias, and I stand by it. And yes, I do enjoy Brill's...
To be honest: I fear uncontrolled biased news agencies reporting on their sprawling interests. I am uncertain how much it affects the news media that we read every day. And I doubt that we can trust them 100% of the time, so it is really nice when they inform us of financial ties to the orgs they report on.
Do I think
-rt-
-rt-
** Evil Canadians are taking over the world. Learn about the conspiracy
Actually, they are leveraging their near monopoly on browsers into a IM monopoly. There is no way to unbundle the Microsoft Messanger from Internet Explorer 6 Beta. Why, when a person is too lazy to download a browser when one is prebundled with the OS, would someone download ICQ or AOL IM when the Microsoft Instant Messanger is in their browser. The installed base of browsers will also give them a huge pool of persons automatically signed up for their service.
--Ryan
What is particularly annoying is that JabberIM is the client produced by Jabber.Com, the "commercial" side of the Jabber development team. If any client was going to work reliably, one would hope that would be the one.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
It's a problem with most open source projects- writing features is sexy, writing manuals is not.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
This isn't "fringe" this is a platform-agnostic open source project that will compile and run on any supported platform with little or no effort.
The only thing 'linux-centric' about jabberd is the insistence on using gmake. (The 'gabber' client is a whole other story, I've never gotten recent versions to run anywhere.)
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
However, the new "web client services" shows some promise.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
It's a real struggle getting a server compiled and running with even the most basic of functionality, and many of the most interesting value-added features have little or no documentation.
There is an active development community on the JDEV mailing list and 'jdev@conference.jabber.org' channel, but like so many other open source projects out there, 90% of the developers are busy writing cool features, with really only Peter Saint-Andre (aka 'stpeter') putting any real effort into documentation.
A lesser problem is what some call 'fascination with the technology', and is a cause of the lack of users- most Jabber users are developers and admins who are more interested in playing with the new technology for it's own sake than as a way to communicate. Basically, 180 degrees from the motivation of the average AIM user.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
There are already several Jabber-related projects only tangentially related to instant messaging, and there are many other interesting applications for XML routing on the horizon.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
Did everyone miss the joke? ..."
"from the and-you-never-shut-up dept.
deran9ed writes:
get it?
echo $email | sed s/[A-Z]//g | rot13
I don't understand why Microsoft doesn't just build an Instant Messanger into their OS's like they did with IE and make that the standard by brute force. Conceivably Microsoft could agree to an IM truce with AOL and have their Windows/MSN IM work with AOL and ICQ. Then that would be the standard. The Bush administration wouldn't go after such an action on anti-trust grounds and that is the only possible deterant I can come up with. Dominance of IM also further isolates non-Microsoft OS's.
Jabber could always adapt to sit next to Gnutella... You would still need a log-in server, but that is all, and you could have several, and the bandwidth would be low. You will just end up with a protocol that relays messages around the network until they reach their intended destination, and then set up direct connections as required. Clients only need a central server to get the address of a pear to bounce messages off.
I tried Exchange 5.5 Chat Server, it blew hard core.
I tried Win2K Server, it blew hard core, I rolled back to NT4.
Thanks for the tip, but I haven't been impressed with the Exchange Group's Mac support, and I'm sure that their Linux and MacOS X support is non-existant. I do actually have a heterogenous environment, so I don't know if it works as well.
Alex
Yeah, groupware is hidden and hasn't been updated since 1998, the last time a new "beta" game out. It doesn't do what it should. It has a special groupware client that is a stripped down version of their client from '98, and it isn't clear if you can run the real client and connect to it.
It seems kind of awkward in it's handling of things. We were playing with it for corporate use, mostly so people could swap messages/URLs and startup Netmeeting conversations.
Unfortunately, the system was never polished. I couldn't figure out a way to strip down the listed helper apps for installation, and doing that at each desk would suck. It became a backburner project before I could do anything useful with it.
ICQ had plans to be a business. AOL gobbled them up, and AOL has never had much interest in moving out of the consumer space.
IM compatibility is nice, and necessary, but isn't the secret to Jabber.
Jabber needs real clients (i.e. Win32 and Mac) that don't suck, and people are comfortable with. It needs the power of ICQ with the simplicity of AIM. It also needs moron proof servers.
This is the key point. The majority of computers are still in the corporate sector. We all use ICQ and AIM for communication, and nobody is happy about it. Some companies have tried to block AIM as a security risk (you can send corporate information out without any log of it), but found that it became key to the company's communication.
A real system where I could communicate externally but have a special internal system would be helpful.
Now, the real solution, IMO, is a Open Source/Corporate combo. In that scenario, there is a freely available public product that is really good. However, there should be a commercial (but inexpensive, IT budgets have gotten tighter) product that works with an internal server that is easy to install. Additionally, include an Admin kit so companies can configure what is allowed.
For example, if I could only allow people to send URLs and text externally, but files internally, that would be a useful collaborative tool. That let's them communicate/goof off/whatever, while not exposing my company except internally. This would also take the load off my e-mail servers.
Additionally, the corporate version should allow the corporate server to communicate on behalf of the clients. That way, I can block ICQ/AIM at my firewall, but allow the corporately supported client through.
Do that, and Jabber takes a REAL foothold. Make the corporate version license access to AIM/ICQ servers (cobranded perhaps) so there isn't a risk of it breaking.
Corporate America is NOT happy with AIM/ICQ. ICQ Groupware dying was a shame. There needs to be a real solution, and there is money to be made in this space. AOL with it's FCC agreement would likely jump at this, they could get revenue to cover costs. The Open Source community gets Jabber to NOT be harassed, and corporate America gets a real communicative tool.
Alex
As a user, that seems like a small price to pay for something that benefits the Internet as a whole. The attacks on AOL and the concerted effort to subvert their attempts to make the AIM network self-supporting are mean-spirited and misdirected. This is a good, free service. It's a damn shame that people are preventing AOL from making the network self-supporting.
Now, admittedly, AOL is no angel. And I don't like their tactics or choices any more than the next guy. But it is their network and they not only have every right to do what they've been doing, but they are right to be doing it. If the open source community doesn't like how AOL is running things, the alternative is not to use their network without their permission and against their wishes. The alternative is to create our own.
If a corporation is a personhood, is owning stock slavery?
I've had trouble setting up jabber to do the CJK langauges. The aim module doesn't work well at all on the stable or unstable server/clients. So I have to stick to email for languages with more characters and IRC for full featured chat. Do you know how to fix these?
So what would it take then to compile it on Win32?
I'd be more inclined to tinker with Jabber if the server weren't tied to Linux. Sure, there are some fringe projects trying to run the server on other platforms (most interestingly, Java). But what is really needed are some other stable platforms for Jabber servers.
I've tried confincing some people at my office to open the firewall for Jabber. I figure, rather than specific holes for each of AIM, ICQ, etc., why notopen one whole for Jabber instead of one for each IM platform? Alas they refused. The next alternative for me would be some sort of HTTP tunneling to get through the corporate firewall. Alas, I have found no support for this, although I've seen tidbits that some people are investigating it.
In fact, the driving forces of Jabber seem to be in conflict with this. The OpenSource jabber.org guys seem bent on adding amazingly cool features and pushing that Jabber is more than IM. The commcercial arm seems relatively silent but appears to be amed only at corporations.
To become a defacto standard, they need users. To get users, they need to focus on Jabber proliferation -- both client and server. Add features the common IM man wants, make it more usable than the native IM clients and servers, etc.
First, attract users to gain visibility. Then add features to show what else you can do.
Check out this article: http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=01/04/16/1 931237&mode=nocomment
It describes a system for defeating AOL's block of jabber.com & the jabber client. Pretty cool!
Structured data. Structured searching. The Enzyme Project
For me the real killer is not having a client that will tunnel through the strict http firewall we have at work :-(
concurrent connection problems? isn't that what JID's are for? Of course you shouldn't all leave them on "JabberIM" or something - the point is that they should be unique
i agree on the keystroke issue in JIM - didn't realise your issue with MSN.
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
I was just about to kick ICQ and then they added free SMS capability.
.oO0Oo.
it's a kick-ass feature. 2 way sms comms with phone users. Just what I needed and it's kept me with ICQ for an extra year.
Sadly my icq db bomed this weekend so I'm installing jabber to see what it's like.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Burris
For example, if I could only allow people to send URLs and text externally, but files internally,
Will I retire or break 10K?
dumbass. get squid, and block direct access to port 80 at the firewall.
This would disallow all access to the World Wide Web. "So use a proxy." Users would just POST their files to Geocities through the local web proxy. "So disable POST on the proxy." And disable the dynamic Web entirely. Bad idea.
Will I retire or break 10K?
For me the real killer is not having a client that will tunnel through the strict http firewall
You may want to try this Jabber applet for the Java platform unless your strict http firewall actually parses the incoming data and does not allow binary Java applets to cross the wire.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I have much trust in the jabber team, but I don't like the fact that they have my icq and msn passwords on their harddisc. I don't know if it could have been done in another way, but it makes me feel insecure.
This is silly since its the first thing that everyone tries to do after installing IM software.
Hello,
AOL provides a client to people who are not customers of their online service without charging them for it.
AOL also, at one time, provided their TOC protocol without any licenses or usage restrictions. Although they removed it shortly after, my former employer used it to add AIM interoperability to our Windows instant messaging client.
From my own personal experience/observation, instant messaging servers are incredibly expensive to setup, run, and maintain. In fact, I would imagine the expenses are somewhat analagous to what the phone company pays in order to maintain the telephone switches used for phone calls.
However, even though your phone company assumes a financial burden to provide this, they do not prevent you from calling people who use other phone companies, nor do they restrict the brand of the phone you wish to use. At least, that is how it works in the United States, I assume it is the same in most countries around the world.
AOL freely and openly published their TOC protocol, which has only a subset of the features used by OSCAR, the protocol used by their AIM client. The protocol was published without any usage conditions or license restrictions attached. My former employer used this information to add interoperability in our instant messaging product. We did not reverse-engineer the OSCAR protocol, and we did not violate any of the conditions for using the TOC protocol (q.v., it was, in fact, shipped without any).
If AOL wanted to make some sort of agreement on advertising revenue with us, all they would have had to to do was to reply to one of our phone calls, letters, faxes, emails, etc., and start a dialogue.
They never did.
My experience with banner advertisements in instant messaging programs is limited, but it was not a major source of revenue for my former employer. Providing OEM versions of the software was where almost all of the revenue came from; and if you can fend off interoperabilty attempts from other companies, you can then potentially make a fortune. But that's only if you control it. If all the information required for interoperability is publicly-available, you lose a very lucrative stream of revenue.
Aryeh Goretsky
- - -
Dexter is a good dog.
The other problem is that there are too many choices that could be confusing for the masses. Receive your messages AIM-style or ICQ-style? Or however the sender intended? And how about those transports...I don't know about anyone else, but I didn't find the system for interfacing with other IMs at all intuitive. Maybe it's different in the Windows Jabber clients (I've only used Gabber). Never mind that you have to convince people to switch from AIM which seems to work fine and also supports graphical emoticons.
BTW, Jabber should have some measures intact to combat spam, if it doesn't already - bulk Jabber messages should be difficult to send out.
See http://www.jabber.com/news/release_102400.shtml for a press release from last fall disclosing the partnership between Jabber and VA Linux, Slashdot's corporate parent.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I've recently begun checking out IM protocols for use in my current employer's application. We want to be able to send messages from our system to a user who could be using any of these IM protocols. This is what initially sent me to investigate AIM. Alas, They don't publish an API. ICQ publishes a very high level one: but not one in which I could write directly to the server. (without a lot of JNI ;)
So, I turned to Jabber. They not only provide an open API, but the team has broken ground for entry points into other IM systems.
Don't even try to give the Jabber crew a hard time for stealing established system's bandwidth. Credit them for working hard to allow people writing IM clients to reach people regardless of the system they're signed up to.
Whatever system becomes the "de facto" standard, let's just hope that it remains useful to those who don't run only those clients that are "blessed" by those who own the standard.
Long live Joey Ramone.
wasn't establishing a future, interoperable instant messaging standard a government mandated requirement of the AOL/Time Warner merger?
"instant messaging will not take off until users gain the ability to communicate between networks and companies." How many millions of users on each of the major IM networks and it still hasn't "taken off." Maybe not within businesses, but to say it hasn't taken off is insane. However, let's work on this need to run multiple clients at the same time.....standards plz.
(see subject)
Rate me on Picture-rate.com
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
imagine getting an email and then replying back with an IM which could bring up a IM window. The email server could just negotiate the connection and then have nothing more to do with the clients. Having separate IM addresses is stupid.
This wouldn't add much load to the mail servers and it would make life a lot easier. It also would be easy to implement for web mail. and regular email clients would soon follow.
This isn't rocket science people. Am I gonna have to get outta my chair?
Of course the jabber people did in fact sumbit a RFC and it was turned down. (read about it on jabber.org) and now it turns out that while the ietf argues about 2 protocols with no support at all that jabber is doing *very* well. I think the IETF messed up on this one and should accept the jabber RFC.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
Real icq users know their numbers by heart ;) Anyway, the trouble is usually with remembering your 7 years old password when retrying your equally old number, not so much the number..
But, as allways, given enough 'obligatory' excercise.. =)
With great power comes great electricity bills.
Default UI is most similar to zephyr, which gale was a reaction to. gale is multidomain, and in theory more scalable across the internet. Encryption for secrecy mostly operates with private messages; public messages have equal standing, and those live in hierarchical categories, which look like Usenet newsgroups, but the subscription is hierarchical: subbing to 'rec.arts' would catch all 'rec.arts.tv' and 'rec.arts.books' traffic. Encryption still comes into play with public messages in signing for authentication.
There is a graphical python/Tk client.
Status: it works perfectly fine for private messages, and there's a buzzing little community with people from Caltech, MIT, CMU, and a few companies, so the multidomain stuff works fine, although there are occasionally hiccups in finding people's public keys, I think usually releated to firewalls. The theoretical scalability is hampered by bugs making multiple servers know about each other dangerous (looping problems), plus the whole concept of public categories is being reworked.
So it's not ready to be used by a million people, at least not a million people all talking together as opposed to isolated cells, but it does work fine for small cells (I think some companies are using it internally) and has neat features, particularly automatic encryption and authentication, and the hierarchical public categories.
More info at gale.org.
For those of you rushing out to get Jabber as an AIM replacement (like I did) better settle down. AOL has started blocking all jabber.com IP adresses from using their servers. So no more interoperability with AIM.
Jabber still works with ICQ, Yahoo, and MSN messangers, just not AIM. Maybe someday AOL and Jabber can come up with an agreement. But as it is, things are at a stalemate.
Stupid like a fox!
Thanks for the info. It's an interesting feature, but it will still cause problems with my network because I share my preferences on every computer. But at least, it will fix it when I forget JabberIM opened at home!
Both of these can be fixed with a quick trip to your Preferences. Simply tell it to not gain focus for new messages.
Thanks! Seems it was fixed in the latest release! It now blinks, so I can see new messages.
The interface is simple, it's easy to use. But there is some problems:
Frequent disconnection
Concurrent connection: If I open two JabberIM on different machines, they will battle for the control of the connection!
MSN stay connected when I close JabberIM. Very annoying, friends talk to a wall during hours.
Or the messages pop and hide my work, or I never see them... I can't wait a few seconds before reading the mail like I was used to on ICQ and MSN.
If a new user send me a message while I write to the other, the new window will capture my keystroke. Very annoying when you say : "I love you!".
If those isues would be resolved, JabberIM would perfect for my needs.
I have trying to use jabber for the last year or so but it just was not good enough. But now finally good enough to use all the time.
AIM "Buddy Lists" are Server Side also. I can add a buddy at home, and they will be on the "buddy list" at work and on the list on my wireless palm.
...but nothing more. Really, it's a neat idea, encrypted IMs would be great in particular, but the damn thing just doesn't work in my experience. Just give me a win32 port of EveryBudy so I can use it on my work machine as well as my Linux box at home.
Ahem, have you got any online friends that are not computer-literate? I use ICQ (versionb 99b) on a daily basis and I can really assure you that some people do re-register. Mostly because they got a new computer (or computer was reinstalled by a recovery CD). Why? Simple: they do not remember their ICQ number, and don't have the reflex to go to www.icq.com (does www.mirabilis.com still exist, by the way?) and search on their own nick/email address to find it again. Even then, they tend to have forgotten the password.
Luckily these users tend to have written down the ICQ numbers of their dearest friends and you will be contacted in no-time again. When this happens, I tell them to backup their ICQ database files, and write down their own number/password somewhere safe.... But of course, backing-up is not a strong point of computer-illiterate people, so it happens again and again.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
If you don't like bloat in clients you might want to give Miranda ICQ a try.
And it's even open source!
Umm, AOL did not invent IM, try "talk" or "write" on any *nix system. Where do you think AOL got the idea from? Kind of like Microsoft and Apple/Xerox. Innovation my ass!
sig?
A question I have is why do people think it's ok to be able to use AIM servers for free? The AIM windows client has a tiny advertisement on it. I imagine this makes up the money they spend on servers.
What do the open source clones give to AOL? Why do they DESERVE to access AOL's server? AIM servers do cost money to run, it's not free to operate.
Why don't the clones make some sort of advertising agreement with AOL--similiar to in the windows client. I would not be surprised if AOL would accept this, and it seems reasonable to me. Of course given the nature of most OSS users, i imagine the advertisements would be hacked out in seconds, and then the castrated version would be distributed--maybe that's why this option hasn't come up?
Scott
Everyone who is on the internet has its own IP address. If you don't like numbers, there's DNS. That way your machine can have its own name. Want to know if your "buddies" are online? Ping their machines. Are they at their machines? Send them a "talk" request.
Let's see...that covers presence and messaging. What about file sharing? There's FTP and Telnet.
Problems with this? Definiately. Practically no one has its own IP address, so it doesn't have its own domain name as well. No one runs talkd on its machine. Talkd is unix only. Currently there are not enough IP addresses for everyone.
Advantages? You don't have to use anyone's central server.
Is instant messaging a better solution? Every instant messaging system tries too hard to hide its users' IP addresses: this makes it very annoying for me to try and use useful protocols--FTP, games, etc--with whom I'm trying to communicate because I have to do all this work to get their addresses. Messages are not encrypted.
On the other hand, Jabber will probably be extremely successful. Why? One word: XML. I have never had a bad experience with any software that uses XML ever, and I don't plan to.
Got friends?
It comes bundled with Windows Millennium Edition. From what I've seen, it's in Windows XP as well!
.sig: Open Source, Open Mind
Why is it that everytime an application/OS/whatever gets a little spotlight, someone comes out and says "it was created for business needs" blah blah blah.
If I had a damned nickel for every time I heard the phrase "Linux, which was started for enterprise business needs..." blah blah.
...a lot of the third party ICQ clis I've used tend to have heaps of server timeouts. At least I recall centericq, micq and miranda-icq doing so. :( (Any tips and any of them?)
Jonathan Ah Kit - Lower Hutt, New Zealand - jonathan@metalab.unc.edu
I was a little disapointed with it as well when I first used it but the new release has brought it to the point where it is by far my favorite jabber client (except that it lacks xml-debug of winjab.) And the beuty part of jabber is the address storing thing. It may be a little bit harder to find someone's jabber address but once you have you never need to find it again since virtually everything is server side with jabber. If you find yourself logging in from different systems this is a god send. Log in on any computer and your address book magically appears.
I've become a jabber fanatic for one reason and that's the server side address book. It is such a dream to be able to sign in from any computer (either with a client or with the java client or if all else fails the new telnet client) and my addresses just appear. It really is one less headache that I'm glad to be rid of when I'm setting up an OS (or reinstall win2k for the 3rd time on the same computer.) There now I've done my evangalizing for the day.
- Want IM and chat it's in there.
- Want your application to work between two computers with dial-up connections and changing IP addresses, just put the XML parser on each machine and go; they'll find each other.
- Want security; who care what data is between the XML tags, use what ever encryption and authetication routines you're comfortable with.
- need logging for security tracking; get your own server, put in your logging functions and make everybody go through it, you can copy everything if you're that paranoid
- want to get through the firewall on port 80? just setup a server that listens to port 80, then connects to another server on what ever port they want, you got the source code change it and re-compile! its XML what difference does a port make to XML?
GET YOUR HEAD OUT OF THE BOX You're thinking like its 1970; its the 2nd millenium. there are no limits, news for nerds, hell you guys think like a bunch of old foogies.Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
What's harming Jabber is not lack of users. Userbases have to be built up from somewhere, and zero is as good a place to start as any.
No, what's harming Jabber is lack of sexual content.
Let's face it: sex sells. Sexuality pervades the modern marketplace, glistening as it dribbles down the sides of billboards selling cars and radiating off the neon shine of liquor displays. If Jabber is to succeed, it must get in at the ground level with sex now, before the secret of successs gets out and everyone's doing it.
Jabber must be integrated with the state of the art in neural network sexual-tension-recognition software to bring the latest in sexual stimulation to sex-starved clients. Whereas AIM is content to convert emoticons such as ":-)" into smiley faces, Jabber must display full-frontal graphic and explicit nudity. If someone ends an IM with }:-), then there had better be goatsex on his partner's screen. We deserve no less.
Only once Jabber has colonized the citizenry's noosphere can it be declared an unabashed success. We shall have six-year-olds snickering "jab her" and making rude pelvic thrusts within our time! Russia shall not be the first to land an IM client on Uranus.
That is the path Jabber's development team should take. Whether they shall see the light is a different matter, alas.
Well, let me put it to you this way... probably only 1% of Romans thought that feeding people to lions for entertainment was a bad idea... so the majority doesn't always know what's best.
Good lord, that's brilliant.
I am Providence.
jabber vb : to talk rapidly, indistinctly, or unintelligibily : CHATTER -- the Merriam Webster Dictionary
Not for me, thanks anyway.
"If the Lord had meant for us to fly, He'd have given us wings with which to soar...." William, 14:35
There is a “Jabber User Directory” hosted on jabber.org. If the admin of your server has activated it in its config, you can register on it. (Your server can also have a local users directory, or both)
So, if the server admins are responsible, we'll get searching capabilities for users that want to be found
IMHO, one does not need such facilities. There is none for e-mail, and we are happy so, aren't we? If there where any such facility, it would make spammer's life SO much easier! How do you send your friends an e-mail? Yes, you ask them not only for their “username”, but also for their e-mail domain. Shocking, isn't it?
And for the “too much confusing choices”, sensible defaults should do the trick for those who are confused. I appreciate choosing the way I receive messages if I wish so. There is no reason to impose that the sender and the recipient see them in the same way if they have different tastes.
AIM, ICQ, MSN and Yahoo messengers are focused on the at-home user. There are some inroads to business users, but they are often viewed with distrust because messages are routed through AOL or MS or Yahoo servers, and also because employees spend a lot of time IMing their friends outside of the company.
As it turns out, businesses would love to use instant messaging for inter-office communication. In fact, many businesses are using systems that predate AIM.
There is a niche market for an instant messaging product which lives totally within a company's internal network. A messaging system which does not rely on AOL's servers would be private and secure, and would be a very attractive solution for a business' communications needs.
It appears to me that Jabber is capable of this type of function. Indeed, it was mentioned in the article.
Jabber.org and Jabber.com (and any other parties would be most certainly welcome) are working together to establish a Jabber Foundation along the lines of the Apache and Gnome Foundations to assist in addressing many of the issues surrounding Jabber being raised here. We've just completed a survey to help us gather some suggestions for addressing these issues and have gotten some great results. One of the many initiatives we're undertaking, in addition to improved documentation, enhanced client development, and extended user involvement, is formal support for the ongoing IMPP work, in particular CPIM, SIP and BEEP. If you'd like more information, email me or info@jabber.org. Peace!
10 January 1610
Here ya go, bunky. http://www.observers.net/AD-lessAIM.html It works on Win95 and WinMe--I speak from experience.
So ya wanna email me, eh? Change