Tips for convince contacts from Jabber/XMPP

Hi all …

well i’'ve a very difficult problem. most of my contacts work still with a propretary messenger like icq, aim, msn or whatever … now i want to convince them from xmpp but how can i do that … has anyone of you some experience with it?

my arguments are: it’‘s free, it’‘s open, it’'s secure, no commercials and you can choose your client software and your provider (e.g. if you have a gmx account (gmx.net) you can use your mail address as your im address) …

but i always get to hear: my friends are all @ icq, aim, msn… security … whatever …

so i can offer them a icq transprot … even an aim transport… but msn not (it’'s illegal to connect to that network without an certified client - what the transport definitve is not!) …

so … any ideas how to convince them from the amenities of xmpp?

You can switch to Linux, then you have the argument that there are no good official clients for these systems except for Jabber.

You can say you use Google Talk (useful when you know the person has a GMail address).

You can install a Jabber client on your mobile phone and tell your contacts that they should use Jabber to send you messages which are cheaper than SMSes for them.

You can say you hate messing with all different accounts and so only use Jabber, email, phone, direct conversations, mail, amongst others.

You can try to persuade the CIO in your company to block all IM for security reasons. Then you can say your contacts that you cannot use the closed systems except Jabber, which you use using HTTP Binging/Polling and JWChat e.g.