It’s been a while since the very subtle launch of my public jabber server a few months ago and since then a lot has been going on.
After getting the server stable and setting it up how I wanted I registered myself with the xmpp federation and acquired one of their SSL certificates to make it all look a bit more professional, which has worked out alright in my opinion. Since registering with the federation, which literally puts your server on the map, my userbase has exploded! Well, not exploded but it is proving quite popular with 42 registered users at this current point in time.
I have been making changes to the site to make it look swanky and contain useful information which makes registering and getting online as easy as possible, something I found lacking on similar sites who left that to your own devices but this is crucial to gain the wider take-up of the service by non-techies, without which the project is doomed to fail.
I’m now looking for ways to promote the service and increase it’s take up in the UK as the impossible conundrum for services like this is without friends to talk to it’s not a great deal of use. Some sites have done well using tie-in’s with other popular services such as Livejournal or just throwing large amounts of marketing at it like Google did, although badly done it seems.
Having neither another popular service to bolt on to or large amounts of cash (or any cash for that matter), I need to find another route to popularity. It’s possible, it just takes some creative thinking, a good example is the new service me.dium.com who are looking at the technology from an entirely new angle, this might well be beyond my technical capabilities at this point in time but it gives me a great and interesting challenge no less 
