As expected, 2003 is off to a strong start in the Jabber world. Indeed, Jabber Inc. recently announced that its commercial user base alone exceeds 3 million users, which probably means that the total number of Jabber users is over 5 million. The exact numbers are hard to estimate, but by any measure Jabber is growing by leaps and bounds!
As you may have seen, jabber.org is currently hosting its inaugural survey of Jabber end users. This is the first of many surveys we will conduct to learn about the needs of end users, system administrators, and developers. The survey is quite short and we've received 1000 responses in only the first week, so if you haven't done so already, make sure to fill it out.
In that strange place known as protocol land, new revisions of both the XMPP Core and XMPP IM specifications have been published in the last week within the XMPP Working Group. Closer to home, Peter Millard's publish-subscribe proposal has undergone much discussion and revision in the Standards-JIG, and may soon be ready for a vote by the Jabber Council. Progress continues on Matthew Miller's ad-hoc commands proposal as well. Ulrich Staudinger also recently announced that he has written an implementation of his Stock Ticker JEP (built on top of the aforementioned pubsub framework). So many possible Jabber applications...
The coders are just as busy as the protocol geeks in the Jabber community. Recently updated software projects include centericq, the Smack and Yaja Java libraries, the RhymBox client for Windows, BuddySpace (a Java client with an innovative spatial view of contact lists), Lluna (a "co-browsing" application), xdb_sql, and Piers Harding's Jabber::mod_perl plugin insfrastructure for jabberd 2.0. Word also came today that the venerable IP*Works! library has added Jabber support to both the .NET and Java flavors of their IM library (check out their beta page for details).
Speaking of coders, the jabber.org developer interviews are back! The latest interview is with MUC and IRC developer David Sutton. Because it's so important to recognize people who make a positive contribution to the Jabber community, we'll be publishing such interviews regularly throughout 2003 and beyond.
Developers and others who follow the many Jabber-related email lists might be happy to know that the lists are now carried by Gmane. In case you aren't familiar with it, Gmane provides a gateway between major open-source discussion lists and NNTP-based newsgroups, enabling you to read busy email lists in a news client rather than an email client. The Jabber mailing list page now contains links to the relevant Gmane newsgroups for your reading convenience.
One of the Jabber lists hosted by Gmane is IM-Patents, our open list for discussion by the Internet community of patents related to instant messaging and presence. While many Jabber folks probably just wish software patents would go away, they are unfortunately not something we can ignore. List participant Bob Wyman recently noted that "there are now 705 pending patent applications that contain the phrase 'instant messaging'"! Bob also posted summaries of some recent IM-related patent applications published by the United States Patent and Trademark Office -- in fact 15 such applications were published on January 9 and 16 more were published on January 23! Some of these applications contain potentially direct threats to the Jabber community, so I encourage you to subscribe to the IM-Patents list and help protect Jabber and the future of open communications on the Internet.
My apologies for ending on an alarmist note, but I don't want to see 4+ years of hard work by the Jabber community come to naught because of myopic bureaucrats at the USPTO, not to mention the avaricious patent lawyers who take advantage of our broken intellectual property system.
So do your part to lend a hand. And, as always, Jabber on!
--stpeter