It’s interesting, elegant, and I really see why people have a hard time adopting Jabber as their main IM tech. As a programmer, I find Jabber awesome. However, from a user’s perspective, Jabber really doesn’t have any new features over, say, MSN.

In fact, if you were to count ‘fun’ features, you would have to give the win to MSN. It might make Jabber more attractive to business, though while can be quite secure, advertising ‘open standards’ gives the uninformed the wrong impression about the technology as a whole.

Ways to make Jabber more adopted:
1) Focus on ease of use and random cool features (for teens)
2) Have one really really cool feature that makes it easy for a persuasive teenager to verbally sell to his/her friends
3) Continue being awesome to code for
4) Advertise how secure it is. Continuously. Secure is never a bad thing; even if your target audience are 14 year olds, adding ’secure’ in front of client descriptions will not make it seem any less cool.

One pet peeve is that most jabber clients advertise with a picture of their client, which makes sense. Why don’t they ever have a full contacts list? I understand that you may want to use test accounts to keep your family and friends from being exposed to 4chan, but I see those limited contact lists and feel sad. It’s probably better to have a blurred out full contact list, than a clear short one.

Also, pictures of chat windows should have interesting text! Honesty, a normal user doesn’t care about the UI (not conciously) as long as it is acceptable. They will download the app based on how useful/exciting it is, and to make it seem useful you should have examples of it being in use.