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

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: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. :)