Big news in France : the radio Skyrock released SkyMessenger (nicknamed SM), a Jabber-based instant messaging service. Some facts :

• Skyrock is famous in France for Skyblog, its very successful blog service, with more than 3.4 millions active blogs. If only a few Skyblog users start using SkyMessenger, it still means a lot of new Jabber users.
• The service seems to be pure-Jabber. Not a modified, incompatible version as in Livecom. People managed to connect using Gajim.
• The client is heavily based on Gajim and released under the GPL.
• The service is only a Beta for now, with a limited number of downloads.
• The address used by the server is skymess.com. Only port 5222 is open, with SASL enabled.
• It seems that the business plan is to provide information through the IM service, about updated skyblogs for examples.
• Server-to-server (s2s) communications are currently disabled. Some well-informed geeks seem to think that they plan to open it. It is confirmed by the add contact dialog, with proposes to add contact of type icq, msn, wanadoo, etc …

I used XMPP4R to do some stats about Jabber clients usage on the Apinc Jabber server, which hosts im.apinc.org, jabber.fr, and many more using virtual hosting.

The stats were done by sending jabber:iq:version requests to online users, and 651 replies were received. It was done at 6:30 PM, french local time. Here are the results :

Systems :

• GNU/Linux : 34% (226)
• Windows: 34% (223)
• MacOS : 23% (150)
• Others (AmigaOS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, SunOS) : 1% (7)
• Unknown (Gaim doesn’t always report the sytem) : 6% (45)

Clients :

• Psi : 28% (186)
• gaim : 25% (166)
• iChatAgent : 18% (121)
• Kopete : 7% (46)
• libgaim : 3% (23)
• Gajim : 3% (23)
• Pandion : 2% (18)
• Trillian : 2% (16)
• Miranda : 1% (13)
• neos : 1% (10)
• Exodus : 1% (8)
• BitlBee : 0% (6)
• Tkabber : 0% (4)
• Imendio Gossip : 0% (3)
• JAJC : 0% (2)
• webjabber.net : 0% (2)
• Gabber : 0% (1)
• Jabberwocky : 0% (1)
• Mafia : 0% (1)
• JETI : 0% (1)

The results might be biased by the facts that :

• Most of the users are quite new to Jabber
• There’s a high percentage of Mac users (and therefore iChat users) since an article was published about Jabber on a popular french Mac website. Those users are sort of parasites who only use the MSN transport.

The script to do the mass-jabber:iq:version sending is available in the XMPP4R SVN repository (data/doc/xmpp4r/examples/advanced/versionpoll.rb). The ruby script to analyze results can be sent on demand. So please run the scripts on your servers :-)