Hello Dick, This deserves a lot of thought, and similar conclusions have crossed my mind, but here's my first reaction:
-Scala and Lift We're really in the beginning, Scala and Lift's popularity is just beginning to grow. I heard there are a lot of Scala-related presentations which were accepted for JavaOne this year, so people are starting to pay attention, it would take some time before more developers consider using it. Lift version 1.0 was released just recently and interest is starting to grow. -the corporate environment A big institution has an enormous amount of inertia. From personal experience: many SAP colleagues don't even use instant messaging because they don't see the advantages. In my current job, out of almost 1000 employees, only me and one more colleague are consistently using Yammer. Microblogging in the corporate environment is in the phase of being used bIy early adopters, so features are what matters at this point. ESME's goal from the start was to be scalable, stable and extensible in a powerful way, not having more features from the start. Many folks have expressed an interest in ESME, but have a "waiting to see what happens" attitude. I suppose when it comes to serious usage, ESME could stand a better chance- once it has reached a stable release. My first guess is that ESME is a bit ahead of its time, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. After all, there were no other Scala projects in Apache before it. I suspect a surge of interest in Scala- and Lift- in the following months as several Scala books are out of beta and the buzz about Scala grows after a lot of presentations about it. So what can we do about it? First of all, I think a wider adoption of Yammer and laconi.ca is not a bad thing, as the bigger barrier for ESME in the enterprise is the acceptance of the concept of microblogging and its benefits. Then we can focus on the unique advantages of ESME- scalability, robustness and the ability to be extended in powerful ways. I'd also like to point out that lack of features is not necessarily a disadvantage. Twitter's selling point was the explicit lack of features- they sort of grew organically during usage of Twitter. My 2 cents, Vassil
