It was. XMPP, aka Jabber, started late 1998, the first version of jabberd appeared in 1999, the standards group started in 2002 and the RFCs were ratified in 2004. Jabber.org, the first IM service on top op Jabber/XMPP opened its doors in 1999.
Skype was first released in 2003, about 4 years after Jabber had already become a thing.
Just because something was there first doesn't make it win nor does it mean it will remain the primary/principle protocol/option :).
> It was. XMPP, aka Jabber, started late 1998… Skype was first released in 2003…
But XMPP didn’t have VoIP until 2005.[0] More importantly, XMPP and SIP don’t have a great story for NAT traversal and privacy. And corporations are shying away from open standards, e.g. Google Hangouts federation, or when Apple FaceTime was supposed to be an open standard.[1]
A very long time ago, before even Jabber was around, I played with PGPfone[2] on my 33 MHz laptop.[3] No FPU. 128-bit symmetric encryption. For voice, the processing power problem is solved to overkill. But PGPfone proved to be useless because it didn’t traverse NAT.
The ultimate lesson from PGPfone: NAT is inherently repressive. It divides the Internet into haves and have-nots, and most everybody is a have-not. If you want to contact another have-not, you must do it through the graces of someone who has public IP address space. That is why I started advocating for IPv6 long before any of my peers.[4]
It was. XMPP, aka Jabber, started late 1998, the first version of jabberd appeared in 1999, the standards group started in 2002 and the RFCs were ratified in 2004. Jabber.org, the first IM service on top op Jabber/XMPP opened its doors in 1999.
Skype was first released in 2003, about 4 years after Jabber had already become a thing.
Just because something was there first doesn't make it win nor does it mean it will remain the primary/principle protocol/option :).