[Members] Jabber Community Forum

[Ian Paterson]

Since www.jabber.org is going to be about "Jabber" and not about "XMPP", 
perhaps it's useful to work backwards from our vision of the future of 
the Jabber name?

It seems that many people here would like "Jabber" to mean to the 
*general population* "The network of IM servers", in the same way that 
"Web" means "The network of browser servers" (and "Internet" means "The 
public network"). [I didn't mention XMPP, HTTP, or IP because the public 
don't know about them. I know XMPP is much more than IM, but we need a 
meaning that the general population will grasp. We can leave XMPP's 
other applications to www.xmpp.org for now.]

Public awareness that a network of IM servers exists, and it has a nice 
name ("Jabber"), should help wean people away from the proprietary 
services (and therefore encourage the proprietary services to join the 
Jabber Network).

With that in mind, perhaps the function of www.jabber.org should be 
purely to promote "Jabber" as "The network of IM servers". [It could 
also mention somewhere not too prominent, "all the servers in the Jabber 
network use the XMPP protocol which you could find out more about at 
www.xmpp.org".]

The www.jabber.org site should be something that Google could happily 
link to when they (proudly) promote the fact to *all* their users that 
Google Talk is part of the Jabber open IM network.

IMHO the question of what should be on the www.jabber.org site is 
usefully answered by another question: "How can www.jabber.org best 
promote the Jabber IM Network"? IMHO it should be a marketing site 
targeted at the general public, with helpful information on how to get 
started and the latest news about client software, and services. [Since 
the general public doesn't want to know about server software (everyone 
knows IE/Firefox, few people know Apache), then any section that helps 
server admins find an XMPP server shouldn't be too prominent.]

- Ian