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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."
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.
My Journal
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....
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.
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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.
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.
/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. :)
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
--Rachel
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.