Jabber revisited
It’s time to revisit Jabber. I have blogged about Jabber before. What I said then is still true, using my developer hat, Jabber is great! However, using my end-user hat: Jabber is unfortunately not anything special. The main issue for me is that I don’t know anyone who uses Jabber (at least not without using ICQ or MSN Messenger as well).
For a long time (like one and a half to two years) I used Jabber through the JAJC as client software, and Tipic and myJabber as servers. But since I only communicated with people using ICQ and MSN Messenger I had to rely on the transports, and frankly that didn’t work too well. The transports lost the connection every now and then, and of course they didn’t support everything that the ICQ and MSN Messenger clients did. So now I use the ICQ client, and the MSN Messenger client. It feels wrong to have two applications doing the same thing, but that is the easiest way.
But there are two things that have happened lately that got me thinking that Jabber still has a future. The first was when I saw the new Jabber client Gush (it’s also a newsreader). It is really great looking and has a nice IM feature called split chat. The other thing was when I read that iChat will include Jabber support. Perhaps that means that Jabber has a future?
Oh, btw, when I talk about future I mean as a competitor to ICQ and MSN Messenger. For the corporate landscape I can’t see why Jabber shouldn’t have a bright future.
Seven comments
I've also had an on-off relationship with Jabber. Back in '99/2000 I was using ICQ, then I moved to ICQ over Jabber, last year MSN, this month it's MSN over Jabber. What has prompted my renewed interest in Jabber is that I've moved web hosts to Dreamhost who offer Jabber support on all their plans. I like the idea of having the same IM address as my email address. Also, iChat might really bring Jabber to the forefront of IM networks and show people the benefits of an open protocol and, if you're with someone like Dreamhost, controlling your IM address just like your mail address. It'll probably be a while before it breaks from the techie community though.
I quite like the Psi client but yesterday I installed Gaim v1.0 (Windows port) and we'll give that one a spin for a while.
Thanks for the comment. I guess I'll have to look at some of the IM clients that support the main IM protocols, like gaim, Miranda or Trillian. It's just that I got fed up with the poor support for transport in Jabber.
I was Googling for reasons to use Jabber, but just like you, I noticed that there were really no special reasons to use it. I already use ICQ and MSN on Miranda, and I'm trying jabber (dip@jabber.org), but oh no, I don't want to try to convince the "common people" to use Jabber - there are really no good reasons to do it (unless of course ICQ and MSN become non-free, a thing that really has a greeeeeat chance of happening).
It's well worth noting that the transports are currently undergoing something of a renaissance, being totally rewritten from the buggy old C versions to Python based on Twisted.
The MSN transport is the first to be rewritten and lives on http://msn-transport.jabberstudio.org/
an AIM/ICQ rewrite has (I believe) just started, based on the MSN transport.
dipnlik: I agree, there needs to be something unique in order to make "common people" migrate.
Pip: I didn't know of that, really good news. I still want Jabber to succeed, I really do.
Don't worry. Soon the popular IM-protocols will be so overrun with spammers and scammers that people will switch over to Jabber willingly. Just like people are switching to FireFox now.
For a nice client with almost all of Jabbers features, try Miranda.
Is there anything about Jabber that makes it less prone to spam besides the smaller user base?