Wonko the Sane's Journal: It's 2009... why does Jabber still suck?

The Past:
I played around with Jabber back in 1999/2000 when it was still new. In installed a server, set up some transports and played around with the clients of the time (I can't remember which ones). While things were initially promising I found that the system had no concept of a meta-contact. If I had a friend with Yahoo, ICQ, and MSN accounts then I had three seperate contacts. So I gave up on it and forgot about Jabber for several years.

The Present:
I don't use instant messaging much, but my wife does every day. Her family and friends live in another country where most people do not have computers in their homes. Every day her mother will go to a local internet cafe and log in to MSN (Live messenger) in order to use the webcam. Fortunately there is a MSN-compatiable Linux client (aMSN) that supports webcams (but not sound). My wife doesn't understand why she can't use voice chat to talk with her family, and wants me to install Windows so she can use the "normal messenger".

So by now Jabber/XMPP should be ready, right? The audio/video protocol Jingle was released a few years ago by Google and several IM clients support various forms of audio/video chat so by now surely all the pieces are put together...

No.

I decided this morning to study up on Jabber again. Fully expecting to find enlightenment, I open up a browser and search for "gentoo jabber howto".

...so apparently there's not much activity. I dig a little deeper and find that wikipedia has some information. Now there are seven server programs to choose from. Some projects are dead, some are commercial, a few are written in java and ...erlang?

jabberd-2 seems to be the successor of the server program I used before. It does support transports for the network I am most interested in (pymsn-t). Unfortunately pymsn-t seems to be unmaintained. On the plus side we have a someone wanting to continue development.

Digging deeper into that thread, someone actually suggests that a XMPP user should be able to send files to a MSN client user, but not receive them in order to push adoption of XMPP! Good idea - deliberately make a program feature-incomplete to subtly break backwards compatability with older programs. (where have I heard that before?)

So I'm back to square one. My wife can do video chat, but not voice chat with her family. No solution exists that will let me install one XMPP client and communicate everyone, regardless of the network they use (even if I'm willing to run the server myself). Maybe in a few more years.