Jabber evolution

I started using Jabber in 2004. Since then, I’m sorry to say, not much has happened.

Jabber still more or less only supports text messaging, file transfer works quite bad, compared to other IM Networks, and Jingle isn’t implement anywhere. This might be exagerated a bit, as there are some attempts for Jingle implementation, and file transfer works with some clients, but it doesn’t work with most of the clients.

I think this is a pity, as Jabber is a technology with alot of potential on so many levels.

Jingle:

Jingle would be great if it would be implemented. But apparantly it is too complicated. So if there would be a few good libraries, this could be realized.

File Transfer:

File transfer is more or less my favourite topic on Jabber :) . It often doesn’t work. Just tried to recieve a file without any success. Although both sides have a SOCKS5 proxy set up. Weird.

Then, at the XMPP DevCon, Pedro Melo came up with the idea, why not use torrent? There are tons of good libraries which can be added to the clients, and all of these libraries do very good NAT traversals and this technology could lead to cool new features.

In theory, you could send one file to several persons, without uploading it to everyone seperately. You could also have Pubsub deliver content, for example your podcasts as torrents.

Server operators could run a torrent proxy, which speeds up downloads, and many other things are possible.

Jabber vs. XMPP:

The last thing I’m going to talk about in this post, is the name. The technology has been renamed to XMPP to make sure that there will be no legal issues in the future with Jabber Inc., but many of us still use Jabber instead of XMPP.

As you can see on the graph, Jabber is far more known than XMPP. Red is Jabber, blue is XMPP. All the marks are explained here.

Invisibility & blocked contacts:

Then we have invisibility. There seems to be no real standard for being invisible. It doesn’t work with all transports. Then you have blocked contacts. I have to be honest, I haven’t played with Privacy Lists on my account, as I generally like everyone on Jabber, but I am missing the button, block contact. This is something which would be useful for all the switchers from other networks.

Well, I think this is all for today. Keep on Jabbering :)