On Friday 13 June 2003 07:04 pm, Rachel Blackman wrote: > No, it won't be; I dispute that people are going to 'make the right choice' > based on those lists, any more than the existing jabber.org client list has > particularly spurred widespread adoption.
Right, the general public does not want to worry about details. They just want to be up and running with minimal fuss. A similar detail is the choice of a server. They should not be burdened by this. Yes, this totally goes against the "philosophy of Jabber", but I think it is worth pursuing in order to drive adoption by typical end-users. We've already got the developer, tech crowd, and standards groups covered. I see no problem in exploring other paths at the same time. > relatively straightforward to use. They also want the glitzy features... > after all, if they can voice-chat from their legacy system, why should they > change to Jabber if it doesn't support it? I totally agree here. I tend to recommend Jabber only to those that have minimal expectations of an IM service. There is still a lot to go.. we need the server side privacy lists, the new file transfer and avatar efforts to finish, a nice voice chat standard, etc. To many of us here, these features may seem extraneous, but to many general users they are simply par. > And even the more savvy folks find themselves stuck with legacy systems > because the less-savvy folks don't change off it. I have maybe 20 MSN > contacts, most of whom are family; I'll never be able to dump MSN unless I > can steer them off of it as well. Which is effectively impossible. I was fortunate enough to have a family that didn't use IM at all, so I gave them Jabber and they are happy. New users are easy. Converting existing users is painful. > But a single client which deliberately obscures much of the complexity of > Jabber from people, which provides the AIM, ICQ, MSN and Yahoo transports > as transparently as possible to get people over to Jabber, which has a > look-and-feel that makes people feel comfortable with it, and which has a > single place where people can go to find help on it... that would have > value in getting folks onto Jabber, too. Only one client appears to have this direction: Rhymbox. However, we still need that "single place where people can go" to back it up. We need a reliable free server devoted to end-users, with an easy client that uses that server by default. And yes, powering this service would cost money, and I don't really have a solution for that. The other way to get the masses using Jabber is for AOL and MSN to embrace it on their server, but somehow I think finding a sponsor for our own user-centric Jabber service would be more realistic. > There are other ways, of course. Lord knows we have enough Trillian users > in our installed userbase, and I'm hoping that adding Jabber into our > package will at least get some of the Trillian users onto Jabber as well. The mass userbase of Trillian cannot be ignored, and I think the inclusion of Jabber is critical. In my personal experience, more folks know about your IM client than Jabber! This is either a sad state of affairs or a unique opportunity. Do us well. ;-) -Justin _______________________________________________ jdev mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.jabber.org/listinfo/jdev
