Syndicon - Backgrounder

While established instant messaging (IM) providers are competing each other ruthlessly, allowing their users only to communicate within their own community, the Jabber open source movement becomes more and more important each day. According to ComScore Media Metrix the first popular instant messenger ICQ reported on June 2003 that the number of users had dropped to six million. At the same time the Jabber Software Foundation (JSF) reached ten million users. 

Jabber Open Source Project

Early 1998 Jeremie Miller introduced his open source project with the sonorous name Jabber. The vision behind the project was to create a broad platform for instant messaging and to allow transparent communication to take place with other IM systems, too.

Since then hundreds of mostly freelance programmers in the whole world are working on server based as well as client based Jabber technologies. Meanwhile there are thousands of Jabber server installations on the Internet and millions of people who use Jabber for instant messaging.

Advantages of Open Standards

(1) Jabber users have an instant messaging ID (in short: JID; e.g. myname@jabberserver.de) accepted about the world which allows them not only to communicate transparently with users of any other Jabber server but also with users of AIM, MSN, ICQ und Yahoo via so-called transports (gateways). Chances are big that the Jabber/XMPP protocol will become the SMTP (so to say) of instant messaging.

(2) Jabber is based on decentralized local servers that send messages and emails from server to server. The protocol ports for communication with AIM, MSN, ICQ and Yahoo are provided on these servers so users don't have to adapt their client every time there is a change.

(3) Commercial providers, without exception, have a centralized structure. Personal data of friends and contacts is saved on a central database, and communication is not secured at all. Jabber on the other hand provides decentralized administration and SSL encryption facilities.

The Development of Syndicon

After almost a year of preparing and developing our project in collaboration with committed programmers of the Jabber scene in Germany, Australia and England the internal test phase of Syndicon started on March 2003. More than 400 users were testing the service with various Jabber compatible IM services for eight months. During that time the messaging server already reached an availability of 99.6% - failures due to configuration maintenance included.

On November 30 Syndicon is starting the public test phase. We're putting much emphasis on the constant improvement of our service. The great dedication of Craft's programmers as well as the active and direct communication with our users is what we're counting on.

Craft AG is expecting that businesses like AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft MSN will respond to the new market conditions. Facing shrinking advertising revenues due to the ongoing drop of user numbers it seems that the proprietary IM services will have to consider opening the gateways.