Jabber Australia

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jabber Australia
Type	Non-Profit Voluntary Association
Founded	May, 2003
Headquarters	Melbourne, Australia
Products	Public Jabber server
Slogan	Open Instant Messaging Down Under
Website	www.jabber.org.au

Founded in May 2003 by Jeremy Lunn, Jabber Australia is an advocacy organisation set up to promote the Jabber/XMPP online instant messaging standard. When the idea of the server was first thought up, there were no public Jabber servers in Australia. The initial goal was to be Australia's first public Jabber server. It was beaten slightly by the now defunct jabber.zim.net.au, but still went ahead undeterred by this minor defeat.

The association was incorporated in Melbourne, by virtue making it a non-profit organisation. It was successful in receiving media coverage in a supplement appearing in the prominent The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald newspapers of Melbourne and Sydney. This lead to exposure on the most well known online news website Slashdot. Sponsorship to allow the public server was offered by Perth based Ilisys Web Hosting.

The forums went live on October 7 2003, shortly followed by the Jabber service itself on November 21 2003. However, growth was slow and the server suffered from some minor reliability problems. The issues were resolved by 2005 and there has been very little down time since.

On April 29 2005, Apple released a new version of its iChat instant messaging software with Jabber support, as part of Mac OS X v10.4 "Tiger". Being one of the few servers with web-based registration, this vastly increased Jabber Australia's user-base with many Macintosh users from Australia and around the world. This also later led to exposure in the Australian Macworld magazine (October 2005 issue).

As of December 2005, Jabber Australia has had over five thousand registrations, though 2,100 of these are considered to be active users based on logouts over a 30 day period. It is currently the only public Jabber server remaining in Australia.