Well, as usual, so much for my promises to publish the Jabber Journal more frequently -- the last issue came out 5 months ago!
But also as usual, the Jabber community has been active. Among other things, the IETF finally published the XMPP RFCs in early October, which is leading to ever-greater interest in Jabber technologies from corporations, governments, and open-source projects. We worked on IETF approval for 2½ years and I'm sure some folks still believe it wasn't worth the time and effort, but I think we'll start to see more and more benefits from it over time. XMPP (that's IETF-speak for the core Jabber protocols) is showing up in all sorts of applications, from the U.S. military to public library integration. More and more people contact me every day about Jabber-based projects they're working on. Unfortunately, I can't always talk about those projects in a public forum, but rest assured that a lot of them will be released over the next 6 to 9 months, so we have a lot to look forward to.
But IETF approval doesn't mean we can rest on our laurels. In fact, it raises the bar for Jabber software projects, documentation, websites, and server administrators. You can rest assured that the billion-dollar companies who run AIM, ICQ, MSN, and Yahoo (and Lotus Sametime in the enterprise space) have not been standing still for the last 2½ years! However, while the Jabber community doesn't have billions of dollars to spend, it does have a lot of smart people, some great open-source codebases, strong protocols, better security than the consumer services, and a distributed network that continues to grow and grow. Back in 1999, no one involved in the nascent Jabber projects seriously expected that someday companies like Apple, HP, Oracle, and Sun would be writing and releasing Jabber-based software, or that over ten million people would be using Jabber for IM. But that's where we stand today, and that growth will only continue.
So what's next? We need to start certifying software that complies with the XMPP RFCs and the various protocol suites that the JSF has defined. We need a really good website for Jabber end-users (see the recent blog entry by longtime Jabberite Julian Missig). We need more user-friendly Jabber clients, not the old "I-suppose-they're-OK-for-developers" programs. We need more clients to implement advanced features like file transfer. We need to settle on and deploy protocols for other desirable features, like user avatars. We need to make Jabber the most secure messaging network on the open Internet (e.g., end-to-end encryption should be a given, not a difficult add-on). We need more stable servers that implement all of the XMPP goodness in the areas of privacy, security, and internationalization.
Yes, that's a big list. (Some would even add more features like Voice Over IP, but I think we need to take care of our core messaging functionality first.) So we need stay focused and stay busy. Thankfully, there are plenty of ways to contribute, and not just for coders -- for example, many Jabber clients (such as Exodus and Psi) allow people from all over the world to contribute localized translations, and documentation is always welcome for a wide variety of projects.
If you're one of those who helps with Jabber-related projects, thank you! And if you're not, roll up your sleeves and figure out how you can help this community Jabber on.
--stpeter