ARCHIVE :: OCTOBER 2002 ::COVER STORY

Best Buddy
Jeremie Miller Champions Open IM

Jeremie Miller is a reclusive college dropout with no formal computer training. But he is in the midst of creating a revolutionary new way for people to communicate electronically.

Name: Jeremie Miller Age: 26 Occupation: Software developer Affiliation: Jabber Inc. "Having an open system has always been a fundamental freedom that I've believed in."

Mr. Miller is the leader of a world-wide software-development project made up of a group of computer programmers who have created an innovative form of instant messaging called Jabber. One of the program's innovations: It lets people send instant messages to someone no matter what type of messaging system he or she is using.

There are many IM programs that have tried to connect to big services like America Online, but AOL has occasionally blocked those outside programs from communicating with its members. What makes Jabber different is that it's a distributed system, meaning that anyone can download the software and essentially create a personal IM system that operates independently of the user's Internet provider. In other words, all the Jabber message traffic is coordinated by the user's own computer instead of the service provider's computer.

Balancing Act

But Jabber is more than just another IM program: It uses sophisticated programming that can allow computers to send instant messages to other kinds of devices, too. For example, D.J. Adams, author of "Programming Jabber," hooked up his coffee pot to a light sensor that detects if the pot is full or empty. He connected the sensor to the Net, and set up Jabber to display "coffee pot" as one of his buddies. When he highlights the coffee-pot icon on his buddy list, it tells him if the pot is full or empty.

Jabber is also highly customizable; anybody can download the software code and make his or her own changes.

What makes Jabber even more unusual is the balancing act that Mr. Miller is pulling off between the world of independent thinkers on the Internet and corporate America. Mr. Miller developed Jabber with the help of a group of more than 1,200 volunteer programmers, who write the software code for fun using e-mail, instant messages and electronic message boards. This strictly volunteer effort caught the eye of a Denver company headed by Mapquest.com founder Perry Evans, and now Mr. Miller is paid to oversee both volunteer and professional developers in an effort by Jabber Inc. to commercialize the software.

Two forms of Jabber have come out of the melding of corporate and free-wheeling Web mentalities. The commercial version is geared more for corporate users. The free volunteer-written software has been downloaded from the Web hundreds of thousands of times, and is still evolving.

Self-Taught

Mr. Miller's inspiration for creating Jabber was his dissatisfaction with the IM programs that most people use-those created by AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft and others. Most of these programs are closed to the public. Mr. Miller wanted to create an open system, with source code that anyone could change. "Having an open system has always been a fundamental freedom that I've believed in and has been my main motivator," he says.

At the time, in 1998, Mr. Miller was working at McGraw-Hill as a systems administrator. In the evenings when he came home from work, he would work on his ideas. He spent a year studying books and teaching himself computer programming.

Finally, on Jan. 4, 1999, he had something he thought he could show to the world, but it still needed a lot of work. So he submitted it to an open-source Web site. Within the first week he got 80 e-mails from programmers asking to join the development group. The first was from Thomas Muldowney, a Texas A&M student who was working on deciphering AOL's IM protocol.

Together, they marshaled a team and started writing code. Soon, Mr. Evans of Mapquest heard about the project and eventually hired the two men.

Working for a commercial developer who was seeking profit as well as an open-source movement that valued quality and principles could have put Mr. Miller in a tough position, but he handles it by respecting both opinions and refusing to take sides.

"Sometimes it's easiest to just relax and concentrate first on how Jabber helps you get what you need done better/faster," he recently wrote on a message board. "That's the most important part."

--Julia Angwin