Perry Evans on Jabber

Opening prose about Perry Evans, Webb, Jabber Inc.

Jabber "pulls" and "pushes" Instant Messaging. It pulls the application forward, into the context of richer and smarter internet applications. It pushes the application onward into the open source community, challenging reinvention and integration into a plethora of possible uses. The result is an open source movement that defines a powerful new instant communications infrastructure.

Instant messaging was conceptualized and implemented as an outgrowth of personal chat services. IM combines presence detection with intuitive personal directory and chat services. Simplicity, aggressive marketing and tight consumer packaging by AOL has led this to become one of the largest and fastest growing applications on the Web today. And one of the most proprietary and controlled. Employing it as a proprietary competitive weapon caused it to be fundamentally narrowcast as a closed service with little thought to the potential for open internet infrastructure possibilities.

Starting with three fundamental principles, Jabber sets the stage for a wide open future.
One, Jabber employs a distributed architecture of IM servers, designed for maximum interoperability. Akin to e-mail, the Jabber architecture is designed to push IM to its most logical base of distribution - behind firewalls, sitting on smart cards, embedded in ISP services, employed in mobile communications services, etc.

Two, Jabber adopted XML as its transport technique. Effectively allowing conversations to incorporate structure - placing documents, applications and message mining in the middle of a conversation. This plants the seeds of a whole new generation of enterprise, mobile and embedded application possibilities. Jabber.com uses the term "Connected Messaging" to aptly describe how Jabber can become connected into rich enterprise applications in customer service, business exchange connections and device-based applications. As businesses extend their internet conversations to their customers, business partners and mobile employees, it's easy to envision how Jabber can become a framework for enriching this opportunity.

Three, Jabber is open source. For the future in which all significant infrastructure technologies thrive as standards-driven open source, Jabber places the software into the hands of all developers that can leverage its power into the myriad of uses that can only barely be envisioned today.