slashdot reviews programming jabber and it’s interesting to see the number of negative and critical comments directed towards jabber, with many complaining about lack of stable interoperability with other IM systems. it’s also instructive to see the responses to a poll on what would make people switch to jabber – with the vast majority responded that they wanted reliable gateways.
i’ve been running a personal server for quite awhile and use the transports on occasion, but they aren’t really the reason why i use jabber anyway. i know it probably doesn’t work for everyone, but i’ve never had a problem getting anyone to get a jabber account if they want to IM me. if they don’t want to download a client, i probably don’t want to IM them anyway. i realize that’s an untenable situation for most people, but interoperability with other IM systems is not a technical problem, it’s an business issue. i think there’s more interesting fish to fry, but my opinions don’t mean much if most people are just looking for an IM client.