> Are you looking for way of making a better user experience? Different > users want different things, and I still don't see how Jabber can tempt > users away from all-in-one chat programs like Fire or Trillian without > putting in several times as many developer-hours of work. That's not to > say that those clients are better, only that they're better suited to > some people's needs.
This is the key point, right here. Jabber's transports have a very good, beneficial feature for people who don't need more than basic messaging; the ability to store your legacy IM userlists and account info on the server, so that you only ever need to provide your jabber login and voila, you're on everything. This is countered by the fact that the average IM user, who you want to spur to adopt Jabber, does not care about that as much. Your average IM user is probably using the system from one computer; my dad only ever logs onto MSN Messenger from his own computer, so he wouldn't care about multiple systems. What he does care about is the ability to pull my sister-in-law and I into group-chats on MSN, and the ability to send files to us over it. Jabber with an MSN transport...? Even if I get him to go 'ooh, pretty' at Rhymbox, there's no way I'd get him onto Jabber if he couldn't have working group-chats and file transfers to his existing contacts. The transports also have a significant flaw, namely that when you get 1,000 connections from a single IP, it's easy to block. The personal-server model works well enough, but it's still difficult to deal with. In large part because, as was pointed out, Jabber and the legacy systems are not a 1:1 mapping except for a very small subset of the overall IM featureset. This is one place where I (perhaps with an obvious bias) do believe that GAIM and Trillian have the right model; if Jabber spends time trying to mutate itself to play catch-up in terms of making the transports work to map higher-end features to the Jabber protocol, it's going to lose. Realistically, Jabber /isn't/ the 'king of the hill' in terms of overall end-user IM, and until someday when all IM standarizes, there will be people who want their AIM, MSN, ICQ, Yahoo, etc. etc. all in one client. And many of them will want the nifty features that the systems support. So which is the better place to spend time-and-effort? Figuring out how to duplicate MSN's file transfer system and map it into Jabber...or finalizing a Jabber file transfer method in the first place which gets around NAT and everything automatically? Deciphering the MSN voice chat system, or coming up with a more comprehensive and featureful equivalent for Jabber? And so on. The transports are a great idea, but they're not going to spur adoption for general users, because in general it will feel like a step down. They have to feel like they're getting something more with Jabber, like it's a step /up/ in order to adopt it, or to feel like it's a no-cost addition to their existing IM experience. As I've mentioned on JDEV, the long-term goal with Jabber support in Trillian is to take every feature we support of every other one of the mediums, and make it work under Jabber. Even if this means writing a hell of a lot of JEPs. And don't underestimate the importance of 'silly features' either; as was noted in other posts, one person adopted Psi just because of the pretty little stars, and another adopted Rhymbox because of the emoticons. My dad won't switch off of MSN Messenger because he likes the emoticons... Anyway. There's my take on it. :) -- Rachel Blackman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Trillian Messenger - http://www.trillian.cc/
pgp00000.pgp
Description: PGP signature
