Continuing The IM Theme

Peter Saint-Andre, the patron saint of Jabber, writes about how there is something rotten in the Jabber community. What’s interesting to me is that some of the things he talks about were all things that crossed my mind as I’ve been reading about Jabber recently. My Gibber Redux post originally had a lot of info about what features I liked about the various IM systems (as well as what I would like and what I didn’t like), especially given that IM is playing an increasing role in my day-to-day life.

Peter pretty much sums up all my thinking with this sentence:

As anyone who talks with Jabber users knows, there are hundreds of Jabber clients but almost all of them are close to useless.

I think that Jabber is a great collection of technology, but which is held back by the clunkiness of the existing clients (especially compared to the pretty immediate experience provided by Yahoo!, MSN, et al) which I’d say is responsible for holding back the building of a network. Indeed, the power of Jabber’s decentralized user model is also one of its key drawbacks: hence my thinking on what might happen if Google did adopt Jabber for an IM service. Suddenly, there would be a massive network of users.

Peter advocates building one brand-new client and one brand-new server, probably in Python, which would act as the de-facto tools for anyone looking to use Jabber services. As he says, “wouldn’t it be cool if you could actually make use of protocols like pubsub, XHTML, and file transfer?“

Yes. Yes that would be cool.

Peter ends by saying “let the flames begin”.

I say bring it on – Jabber has been great at producing the specs, but here’s a question: what happens to specifications that nobody can use?