That's how I first learnt about Jabber, and it's still the killer app for me as an IT specialist. I think people will still seek out and adopt Jabber to get this very significant benefit.
While it would be lovely to have a consumer-grade IM product out there, the fact is that centrally hosting such a service (as people have pointed out) costs heaps of money for bandwidth and server costs. Additionally, the administration, maintenance, moderation and content creation time would be almost prohibitive on a volunteer network.
Finally, as long as interoperability remains a distant dream, there will always be great difficulty in converting people to Jabber. Why use Jabber with a MSN gateway (that may or may not work on any given week) when you can just use MSN?
So, how does a relatively small organisation such as JSF and its hordes of volunteers compete against the behemoths of AOL, Yahoo! & Microsoft?
I think the Jabber community has three main options:
(1) Set up a centralized jabber.net website. Pick an 'official' client. I understand that agreement on the 'best' of anything is almost impossible for an open-source community, but it's *essential* for end-users to feel comfortable that a 'sanctioned' client will do what they need, and be well-supported. As noted above, this may be very hard to fund properly.
(2) Ignore the consumer market and continue to drive adoption in company-wide IM systems. Once IM interoperability becomes critical mass and/or more funding becomes available, move to a more consumer-oriented model.
(3) Come up with a way for consumers to connect to Jabber-based systems through some kind of distributed mechanism (think Gnutella or BitTorrent) that only *authenticates* centrally at jabber.net. In this way, multiple small servers could potentially serve a very large user community. Of course, the big problem here is that the Jabber protocol doesn't make provision for this kind of system ... yet.
What does everyone think?
Regards,
GuruJ.
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