It really is a shame that Jabber is not as widely accepted as the major (proprietary) instant messaging services like AIM, ICQ, MSN, and Yahoo.

Considering Jabber is an open platform that is a secure, ad-free, and bloat free alternative to the other services you would think that more people would adopt and use it. Alas, it has become increasingly apparent to me over the years that the only people who seem to truly use and respect Jabber are my fellow *nix users and techies.

Jabber is the only instant messaging system I use and one of the main factors for this is that it is an open platform as opposed to a proprietary platform. Some of its major "selling points" aside from the fact that it is an open platform is the ability for a person to start their own Jabber server should they ever desire to do so. It can even give users the ability to communicate with friends using proprietary platforms via the installation transports on the server should one desire.

I always try to bring it to the attention of the non technical people and spread the word around me whenever I find someone that shows at least some interest. I have found that one of the best ways to bring it up is of course when you are asked for your contact information and you give them your UID.

It would be great if we could get a bunch of people together in order to launch a decently sized grass-roots campaign for Jabber similar to what people did for Firefox.