Tim,

As another interested party in Jabber technology and as a fellow technology thinker, what do you think about MS Hailstorm? Looks like they are trying to play catch up with Jabber. Jabber does provide a great deal of useful technology architecture for developers, including addressing, presence, and messages. What's your take? I kind of saw this coming.

By the way, our Jabber Client/Server is forthcoming, as we complete the upgrade of our specialized components to v1.4 of the server. I'll be sure to send you a copy. The viral aspects of the technology make it almost self-distributing.

I really enjoyed the Peer-to-Peer Conference, and it was great to meet you and many other wonderful people that will have a fundamental impact on the future of computing.

Sincerely,

Richard Braman
Cofounder
Audiencebank Media, Inc.

Don't miss The O'Reilly Peer-to-Peer and Web Services Conference, September 17-20, 2001, in Washington, D.C. The call for participation is now open.

Hi Richard,

Frankly, I doubt they even know about Jabber. Hailstorm is aimed squarely at America Online's IM properties, AIM and ICQ. Microsoft hasn't made much headway with MSN Messenger as a consumer play, and I think they've realized that there's a real opportunity to play to their strengths as a platform software vendor. AOL sees these as applications; Microsoft realizes that IM is a strategic technology that can be used to build many types of applications. I'm sure they are mindful of the opportunity that Groove and Jabber are both pursuing, to turn IM into a framework for application development. It's an obvious one for them.

But there's nothing sinister about this. At the end of the day, this is an opportunity that many people see. Microsoft would be remiss if it didn't build some tools for buddies, presence, etc. into its frameworks.

BTW, I'm curious if you are working with jabber.com on your implementation, or just building on the open source release. If the latter, do you see yourself as a competitor to jabber.com, or did you just not see the need to work with them? (PS, I'm on the webb board . . . webb being the parent of jabber.com. But I'm not looking for any particular answer . . . just curious. I've cc'd a couple of people at Jabber since I'm sure they'd like to know what you're doing and if there are opportunities to work together to establish Jabber as a strategic platform.)

Tim