[Standards] XMPP vs. Jabber

[Andreas Monitzer]

Hi,

Since the surroundings of XMPP were slowly renamed from Jabber to  
XMPP (Jabber Foundation, etc), I tried to do the same thing for  
Adium. However, there is some resistance in the community, since  
nobody knows the name XMPP, while Jabber has a better market  
recognition. Additionally, XMPP is thought to be "too geeky", and so  
will never be quite as accepted.

One of the Adium developers compared XMPP vs. Jabber to email vs.  
SMTP: When asking people on the street, close to everybody will know  
what email is, but you'll have a hard time finding somebody who knows  
what SMTP is (even some computer science students don't know that).

I thought about a solution to this problem, and I'd like to propose a  
change to the Jabber name usage. SMTP is not email, email is a  
collection of protocols, which allow you to communicate with  
everybody on the world. This concept could be adapted for the name  
"Jabber".
What if Jabber would become the official name for the network of  
interconnected s2s-enabled XMPP servers? This would be very similar  
to world wide web vs. HTTP. That way, somebody could be reachable by  
Jabber, but still use XMPP. Internal company IM would be XMPP, but  
not Jabber, since it wouldn't be connected to the outside world (like  
intranet HTTP servers).
This solution would end the confusion between these two names (I was  
asked multiple times what the difference between Jabber and XMPP is  
last year when writing my "XMPP" plugin for Adium during Google  
Summer of Code).

andy