Joe Auricchio

For the past ten months or so, I’ve used only Jabber and Google Talk as IM services. No AIM, no MSN, no Yahoo. I signed off of the others, permanently as it seemed at the time, because I believed I need to do everything I can to help encourage an open XMPP network, analogous to the open SMTP network that delivers email.

Recently I’ve realized that trying to get the whole world to move to Jabber is hopeless. There’s simply too much inertia in the big three legacy IM systems. Little nudges will not be enough, because to the vast majority of people, the reasons to switch seem like unimportant technical details. The only thing that will pull people permanently away from the big three is when the big three themselves either move to jabber (unlikely) or die (also unlikely).

Meanwhile, the open network is very slowly appearing. Companies and organizations are slowly rolling it out. I haven’t heard of any universities providing Jabber accounts to their students, yet. Ahem. (Hi DJ!)

So I’ve decided that my idealistic goal of moving the world to an open XMPP network is not worth cutting myself off from my friends. It pains me to write it, but I’m going back to AIM.

I’ve re-added most people whose screen names I remember. If you want to talk on AIM again, and you don’t see me, leave a comment or email me, and I’ll re-add you.

I’m also shutting down my Jabber server (tongos.com), and I’m combining both Jabber accounts (tongos.com and gmail.com) into one new gmail account (j.auricchio). I still prefer using Jabber over AIM, when I can.

This entry was posted Tuesday, August 29th, 2006 at 7:13 pm and is filed under Thinking. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.