A few months ago I made a post telling the world that as of my birthday of this year I would no longer be using AOL Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, or ICQ—and use federated IM services (Specifically those using the Jabber protocol) exclusively. Well, guess what: Today's my birthday.
For those of you who are still confused as to what exactly Jabber is, read on and I'll break it down for you one more time.
When I announced a while back that as of my Birthday (May 19th) of this year I would no longer be using AIM, ICQ, YIM, or MSN in favor Jabber, I did not quite anticipate the response I received. Apparently I struck a chord with some people.
Some were confused, some even seemed upset, but most of the responses I have received have been extraordinarily positive—even to the point of adopting my birthday as the day that they swear off those legacy services.
The idea was pretty simple: The most common excuse I hear for not using jabber is "I don't know anyone who uses Jabber who doesn't use anything else". Well, now they will. But getting a Jabber account just to chat with me seems kind of silly. It can be kind of hard to know who has a Jabber account and who doesn't, even with the Jabber Users Directory. I think what we may need is to create a database which also includes people's legacy addresses as well. That way, if/when you migrate to jabber, you can more easily see who is using Jabber. Just a thought.
It doesn't feel right to make a post about Jabber without also mentioning the recent loss that the Jabber community has suffered. Peter Millard, a long time member and contributor to the Jabber community, passed away on April 26th. My condolences go to wife and daughter. He will be missed.
I just noticed yesterday that Google Talk now seems to support vCard avatars! Apparently, they support pretty much nothing else about vcard-temp... but hey, at least I no longer have to keep explaining to my friends why their avatars don't work with their gmail accounts. 
Just a reminder to everyone: I'll be dropping my accounts on AIM, MSN, ICQ, and YIM on May 19th of this year, and switching entirely to Jabber. So grab yourself a gmail account if you don't already have a jabber account!
The idea of using XMPP as a transport for email (possibly a replacement to SMTP) is not new, but so far I haven't really seen anything come from the idle speculation. And, more importantly, that's not what this post is about anyway. At least not yet.
I'm considering writing an eMail jabber component that would allow you to check, view, read, reply, and write email. The first step to doing that is to write an XMPP protocol for email. Think about all of the features of IMAP, with the ability to receive real-time updates and send mail. There are many benefits to doing this:
Just out of curiosity, I did a Google search for "xmpp resume". Guess who's resume was listed first? O_o
No wonder I've been getting calls for XMPP/Jabber related jobs...
Update: Apparently now this post is the number one search result. Go figure. 
As I have mentioned before, I believe Jabber/XMPP will be one of the most influential technologies on human communication since the introduction of standard email1. I've been thinking lately about ways to encourage my friends to make the switch to Jabber, and I've come up with my solution.
As of my birthday this year (May 19th), I'll no longer be using AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, or MSN. The only way you will be able to contact me via IM will be via my jabber id, darco@deepdarc.com2. So if you want to chat with me after this time, you'll need to at least give Jabber a try.
It would appear that Google Talk has has not only begun testing Server-to-Server communication with the google.com domain, but also enabled S2S communication for gmail.com! This should be the major turning point for Jabber adoption. It's time to take over the world. 
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