Jabber Gathers Steam In Australia

Jeremy Lunn writes "Jabber is on a rolling start in Australia with this article featured in The Age in Melbourne (and the Sydney Morning Herald) 'Jabbering classes push for more power' and the formation of Jabber Australia."

Comments

Jabber and IRC

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems to me there are a lot of similarities between jabber and IRC. The major two being that they're both open standards and they both distribute clients amongst many different servers.

Unfortunately, it seems like this makes Jabber prone to the same problemst as IRC: netsplits. Could anyone tell me if Jabber has any sort of elegant solution to this problem?

Re:As SIMPLE as that

[Anonymous Coward]

SIMPLE is simple and standard; a recipe for success.

What's standard about it, compared with Jabber? It hasn't even been implemented yet. Show me a client that supports it.

Re:Interconnected?

[samael]

Yup. IIRC, everyone has an address of username@jabberserver

You connect to your jabber server and when you connect to a user on a different one, your server talks to the other one and passes the message across, just like happens with email.

Nice in theory

[Trozy]

While it sounds like a great idea, I'm sceptical as to whether it will actually become widely used.

The big players have already claimed a significant section of the market. And the IM market is subject to the first mover effect (first in gets the biggest share) and the network effect (you need people to get people). It doesn't matter how good the protocol is, if there are only 10 other people you can talk to with it, it is not of much use.

Not to meantion that Microsoft's Messenger (*shudder*), comes stock standard with Windows XP, and is a "built in feature", just like the DOJ thing with IE. I wasn't able to purge it from my system, through any control panel, but had to locate the directory and remove it the old fashioned way. Sadly I think this is far beyond the skills of your average GUI-domesticated user, so people will just end up using it.

If you could get the major IM clients to conform to the protcol everything would be fine and dandy, but good luck with that....

Re:Nice in theory

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that AIM/ICQ/MSN already have a lot of users does not matter that much for you can either use Jabber's gateways (that let you add other IM systems users to your Jabber roster) or a multi-IM client like Miranda (that talks ICQ natively but also can do Jabber) or in some time Trillian (for which a Jabber part is in the making).
Of course, most sheep will stay with AIM or MSN but then again that's only as shameful as having a @hotmail or @aol mail account: Many people do but no one with some experience cares ;-).

I can say from experience that the Jabber user base expands pretty fast. Many IM users are tired of platform-dependent IM clients or simply want features only Jabber has on all platforms without hassle (think about server-side contact lists).

Re:Nice in theory

[AussiePenguin]

At least in Australia, the IM market has changed hands at least once, only it was ICQ to Microsoft! I don't see why it can't change hands to Jabber if we provide what users want (we'll need to make it easy for them and we'll need a fancy looking client of which RhymBox already is).

Openness

[Mr_Silver]

"The key advantage in Jabber remains in the openness," says Lunn.

The problem is that the average Joe doesn't seen openness as an advantage. If it doesn't allow him/her to chat to Rita, Bob and Sue on MSN and/or ICQ, then he's not going to change.

Openness is great and good and is a worthwhile goal, but unfortunately you have to tell Joe that in order to get the full advantages that Jabber has to offer he's going to have to change his client AND get his friends to change (and they'll not want to change unless their friends are going to change too).

Unfortunately for a lot of people - that sounds like too much hard work and they'll stick to MSN or ICQ.

Side note: Most of my friends use MSN these days having initally been initially on ICQ (we're talking 5-7 digit UID's) and they're not all techies. Some far from it.

Re:Openness

[Narcissus]

Unless, as other people have mentioned is happening, they start to use it at work. When you use a tool at work often enough, you grow accustomed to it and look to using it at home.

Also, I see a potential for this in schools. Instead of having a pen friend, or email friend, as schools seem to be encouraging, there's no reason why they couldn't push for IM friends, I guess. The beauty of having the server code open source, and the standard open, is that there's no reason why you couldn't implement a "closed system" of student servers. They could still use it from school or home by connecting to their school's server, but you could still talk to other students connected, too.

Re:Openness

[IamTheRealMike]

Determining how Jabber performs this magic is left as an exercise for the reader.

That's a bit harsh, considering that all the popular Jabber servers were blocked from ICQ and AIM years ago (i remember when ours was), and the MSN transport is as far as I know, unmaintained.

I used Jabber as an inter-IM solution for a long time, but eventually gave up and just use Gaim instead. Simpler. I still use Jabber, I'm in the unusual position of knowing a lot of people who use it, so it's imperative that I have a connection to it.

Jabber has 3 problems right now:

1) Lack of people on it, the whole network effects problem.

2) Lack of killer features. After all these years they are finally getting the basics nailed, stuff like file transfer. Though this ties into point 3. Jabber really needs some unique features not found elsewhere to convince people to use it... I'd like to do really sweet integration with the Linux desktop at some point but it hasn't happened yet.

3) Lack of quality clients. On Linux this is being rapidly solved by Gaim (though it's not there yet), and on Windows RhymBox is excellent with its only real problem being that it's pure Jabber - great for work, not so great for home. Sure it supports transports, but like I said, they are a somewhat failed experiment.... too easy to block, and it's easier to get better integration through client side code.

Re:Trillian

[NisJ�rgensen]

Jabber is not just another IM standard.

Jabber IS an IM standard, as opposed to MSN Messenger, AIM, ICQ and YM! which are IM systems, consisting of a protocol (often secret), servers and clients. It is possible to replace the clients, but if you want to communicate with users of these systems, you have to use their servers (including having accounts on them). The AIM/ICQ server has been set up in a way that tries to lock out everyone who is not using their clients.

Trillian (and other multi-system clients) deals with this by mimicking several different clients. Jabber deals with it by defining a standard with which users on different servers can communicate, then waiting for the rest of the world to catch on. In the meantime, jabber users can use a gateway on the server to communicate with/converting their old ICQ/MSN buddies).

Note, BTW, that Trillian does not include a Jabber Client. They now where THEIR worst competition, and they are not going to help by making the transition easy.

Re:Trillian

[Sparks23]

Honestly, on the day that all the messaging networks get together and agree on a standard, I'm fairly sure my co-workers and I will be dancing with joy. There's an element of cool challenge to hacking apart the AIM protocol, the ICQ protocol and so on. But it's also a monumental headache and time-consuming task, and the only reason to do it is because right now, there /is/ a need for cross-network clients.

On the day that cross-network clients become unnecessary, our job of making a good central communications client becomes a lot easier, because we don't have to spend so much time making sure so many different protocols all work! :)

CenterICQ supports jabber, AIM, MSN, ICQ, IRC

[Anonymous Coward]

Along with Trillian and Gaim, another alternative is CenterICQ (console based for those who use screen!) CenterICQ site CenterICQ fan site

Re:As SIMPLE as that

[Sparks23]

Ironically, I find Jabber a much more simple/straightforward protocol than SIP/SIMPLE. Especially as Jabber in its present form can be used as a full-featured instant messaging packages, where SIMPLE is not far enough along, and the only SIMPLE implementations therefore rely on proprietary extensions to flesh it out.

This isn't a troll; I do honestly think SIP and SIMPLE have their place. SIP is way more suited to negotiating multimedia streams than XMPP/Jabber ever will be. SIMPLE strikes me as much better for handling 'conference call' type situations without relying on Jabber's groupchat implementation, as well.

But SIMPLE just ain't here yet...it's a promising base for a lot of things, and the pledge of various instant messaging networks to support it is great...but it's still under construction. Jabber /is/ here right now, and easy to implement, and functional today, and despite some of its own rough edges it's always felt a lot simpler to work with than SIMPLE. XML's pretty darn easy to parse. :)

Jabber rocks.

[porter235]

Open standard.
XML based.
server side transports.
can be used for more than just IM (games etc. can use the same protocol, and it won't get a chat msg and a chess move mixed up)
you can ENCRYPT! as well as SSL... (This is great for large companies who don't want all of their communications being routed through Microsoft or AOL)

Re:As SIMPLE as that

[hey]

Jabber Inc has a white paper saying why they think Jabber's XMPP is better than SIP/SIMPLE ... The IM standards race

But don't believe them. Since you are reading Slashdot you can handle reading the real specs. XMPP is very reasonable and SIP is nuts. Just trying reading the spec.

It seems Microsoft has backed SIP/SIMPLE. This is probably a political move. They cannot back XMPP since that's their "enemy". Of course, they'd prefer it if every just used MSN. What a horrible world that would be. In fact SIP/SIMPLE is so bad and far away from implementation that its good for them. And delay towards standardization is good for the company that owns the desktop and installs their IM client there.

I could never imagine using MSN -- every thing you type going thru a server in Redmond! They'd also monitor when you took a coffee break.

Re:As SIMPLE as that

[Dirus]

Jabber is, well, technically superior. But history is a good teacher (Beta vs. VHS, etc, etc, etc)

For those feeling confused about all this Jabber/XMPP vs SIP/SIMPLE, here is a short article which talks about the difference between XMPP and SIMPLE.

The InfoWorld article also claims IBM is siding with SIMPLE, not with XMPP like the article in the Slashdot story suggests. Other articles also suggest IBM is siding with SIMPLE not XMPP. If you don't mind the PDF you can see for yourself that IBM's Lotus uses SIMPLE.

This is my sig, this is my gun. This is for fighting, this is for fun.

The problem with Jabber

[metamatic]

The problem with Jabber used to be that it didn't work. This article has inspired me to give it another try, and I'm glad to say it does now work, so I'm going to try using it for a while.

There's still a big problem that'll get in the way of user acceptance, however: it's extremely complicated. Some of the complication is unavoidable, in that you have a multi-server system with gateways to multiple external protocols. However, some of the issues are just down to the fact that it's a system where the clients are currently being designed and built by hackers, for hackers.

What is a message queue? Why do I need to care about it? I've never seen any other IM client that expected me to deal with such a thing. "Close the event window going to compressed mode"? Uh, whatever.

"Custom presence entries"? WTF is that, presence of people who don't exist? "Synchronize presence with multiple copies"--uh, why would I want that, in case I have multiple personalities? I just want to log on from wherever I am and have it work.

I'm not trying to be picky here. I'm a computer scientist. If this thing isn't blatantly obvious to me without looking at the documentation, there is zero, I repeat, zero chance that my mother and my arts graduate friends will be able to deal with it.