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The world doesn't need more plugins, the world needs fewer protocols. I read the "AOL bridges AIM and ICQ" from the perspective of hoping the AOL was moving towards the use of the Jabber protocol as a common baseline for instant messaging.

Jabber is a nice superset of existing instant messaging and chat functionality, from the programmer's perspective. It is, IMO, technically superior to ICQ, MSN, IRC, and other chat/IM protocols. The main thing that prevents it from dominating is really acceptance/buy-in from the big IM providers: AOL, MSN, ICQ, ...

Jeff

• Open Source (GPL)
• Open Protocols (Jabber)
• Connectivity with AIM, ICQ, Yahoo! and MSN
• Multi-platform
• Secure connections (SSL)
• HTTP Proxies support

Nice troll. Well not really, and it got marked up to insightful for some reason. Way to go, moderators. Now if you'll all put down the crack pipe and read the following:

Hey, guess what? You don't have to install ICQ to talk to ICQ users. You could use one of the many Jabber clients available to you, though I don't prefer them myself. Programs such as Trillian and the free, open-source GAIM allow you to simultaneously connect to various different IM networks with relative ease now, and despite not supporting the entire feature set of these networks in the case of GAIM, is certainly preferable to having a client installed per each network.

There's also the web pager and web chat room (http://wwp.icq.com/#######, where the # signs are for the number of the user you want to contact). Send them a pager message letting them know you want to talk in their web chat, and away you go.

There's -also- a Java client on the ICQ page (over here), which you can use from just about anywhere if all you want to do is get through to people on ICQ, but the above alternatives are preferable in most cases.

There's also..oh, hey. You're probably not even reading this anyway, are you troll? You got your cute little jab in, and you've probably moved off to harass some other group. Sorry to have wasted your time with reasonable discussion.

I have given up on ICQ/AIM a long time ago. I now use Jabber for all IM needs. Seriously, I recommend it to everyone who is currently using ICQ or AIM. There are transports which can connect you to your previous network so that you don't loose connectivity to your friends.

The public servers list at http://www.jabber.org/user/publicservers.php doesn't list any servers in the .uk domain. By guesswork I found http://www.jabber.org.uk/ but the front page says the server admin has had to close this server for new registrations due to traffic overload.

ISTM we should all use as local a server as possible, so I'm reluctant to register on the main jabber.org server.

It seems you missed the point of Jabber.

Jabber is (for now) an instant messaging protocol that provides so many features that you would be amazed. Most of them are not present nowadays on propietary IM, but maybe they'll copy them from Jabber later. Some are 'server temporal storage of messages if contact is unavailable' or 'server based filter rules' and a lot more.

Perhaps you can't find their utility now, as you have been induced to think propietary IM has everything you would ever need. Just wait.

Reading your comments about some client with so many strange options, it seems you are talking about JAJC client. Please try the other three main Jabber clients (all of them GPL'ed) and you will see that every person-requirement has a client ;)
Psi (multiplatform),
Tkabber (Tcl/Tk) and
Exodus (Borland Delphi).

More clients on jabber.org

Some clients' screen captures

Exodus is my preferred Jabber client under Windows. It also supports HTTP Polling, which allows the client to connect through HTTP proxies. Very useful if you're behind a firewall!

Jabber is more than "just" an instant messaging thing - it's a simple bidirectional socket-based generic DTD-less XML protocol that is computer-language agnostic. Unlike the request/response model of HTTP, Jabber messages are asynchronous (unsolicited messages allowed in both directions) and share a single socket connection until the session is complete. In each direction on the socket you have a single-rooted XML document. Each Jabber message is basically a sub-node of this document as parsed by your favorite SAX-style parser firing a callback when the message is received. There are some manditory tags for joining groups, broadcasting and requesting info among other things. For the most part you just support the message types that you care about and you can add your own application-specific messages with custom XML payloads. If a Jabber client or server is not familiar with a message type it is ignored. Nice. Simple. Effective.

If that happens, why not use something better such as Jabber then?

The Jabber protocol has supported PGP for a while, and quite a few clients support it. It's used both for end-to-end encryption and for signing both your presence and messages. I'm running a development version of Psi with GPG currently.

So, if you are a jabber client developer or intend to become one, see this article for a proposed handling of Open PGP -type encryption.

We already have JabberIM which does this and at the same time provides tunnels to other IM networks.

You're an adult.
Thank you, but I have to admit that I'm only 17, and I was 16 when I bought my Z.

I think the only reason WHY they wouldn't want to use this device is if they also were heavy into video conferencing as well. Ever watch a teenager use a computer?
Yep, I do. Quite a lot actually. Unless you mean really *use* a computer, not using Microsoft Office for school work. At my school there are about 100 system (mostly Celeron 600mhz), for 450 students, and they are all in use almost every hour.

Sure, you could buy a PDA.. ever teenage kid has $400-$500 to spend on a PDA. This device is under $100, and thats the initial price.
The Zaurus SL-5500 sells for just a little more than $200 now, nowadays teenagers like me receive nice wages, so I think the 100 bucks extra isn't such a problem. Of course, due to the right marketing (read: targetting at teenagers), these devices will be selling much better than PDAs in the age 12-18.

For the PDA, you also need to buy the AIM software (AOL stopped giving away the PalmOS version at some point in the past few months, I believe).
Nope, not true. Ever heard of Jabber? Jabber is an OpenSource IM system, which has support for gateways to most populair IM networks (ICQ, MSN, AOL, and other). There are two or three jabber clients for the Zaurus, and I know of the existence of one for the PocketPC (there are probably more).

Quite frankly, I think the kids are going to want this for Christmas.
I hope mom and dad will look at the nice(-prized) PDAs too.

I am totally ignoring IM until there is a real standard.
Check out Jabber's IETF page. I hope XMPP pulls it off. It's hurting my social life -- this no IMing!

But, have you thought of using somethink like SMTP (email)? Shoot your data off to some email address (and it could be anywhere). Assuming no data loss (which SMTP/email doesn't guarantee), you'd get a simple approach at data storage.

Another, possibly more guaranteed and more real-time would be something like Jabber, which is a sort of Instant Messenger transport protocol, where you could define your own packets of data and who/where they'd be sent.

Though, I guess you could just as easily FTP to anywhere too...assuming you have access to the internet.

Just brainstorming...

You dirty lying /.ers - YOU ALL ARE RUNNING AOL!

Well, it doesn't rhyme with Troll...

But you're talking about Jabber.

What about SOAP, XML-RPC?

That's indeed a good question:
- JEP-0009: Transporting XML-RPC over Jabber
- JEP-0072: SOAP Over Jabber

What about SOAP, XML-RPC?

That's indeed a good question:
- JEP-0009: Transporting XML-RPC over Jabber
- JEP-0072: SOAP Over Jabber

Finding Gateways
Using Gateways

Finding Gateways
Using Gateways

If you go to Jabber.org you'll see there has been a lot of large investments/installations of the Jabber protocol (usually from Jabber Inc.) recently, from companies like Intel, France Telecom, EarthLink, etc. So I think headway is being made, but there aren't large annoucements being made that Joe AOL user would notice. And maybe that is where the problem is. When a city government I was contracting for was looking for an instant messenger solution I instantly suggested Jabber, since I had worked with both the open-source Jabberd and Jabber Inc servers. Fortunately, with Jabber Inc being a local company (I live in Denver) getting them to come out and show-off their wares wasn't a difficult thing to do. But, I'm sure that outside of my boss at the time, very few, if any, of the city's IT people were aware of Jabber and were all probably thinking AOL, MSN, Yahoo!, whenever the topic of IM came up.

I went through practically every Linux client I could find before finding one that I was happy with. Psi is a Qt-based client that acts and feels very much like the original ICQ client. No ads, sidebars, topbars, navbars, barbars... just a regular clean and simple IM client. There is an extensive client list for Win32, Linux and MacOSX which lists the features of each. Psi works on all three, which is another reason I chose it. That, and the fact that, at the time, it was the only NON-Gtk client that looked half assed presentable and the ONLY Linux client that didn't take up a lot of screen real estate, and the ONLY Linux client that did NOT pop up the incoming message, stealing focus from whatever I was typing into.

Psi's Jabber client lib (and ssl comms) have been adopted by KDE for their IM clients too, which is a nice bonus.

Or you could just use jabber

This Rendezvous editor looks great for "a bunch of macheads sitting at a meeting"...but Until Rendezvous is extended to more platforms and actively used, this is useless for most people- I serve as 'editor' of a large manual, and nobody else in the group of about 12 has a Mac(I use Lyx/Latex for the manual...and that makes getting edits in from people is a total PITA.)

something Jabber based would be much cooler, since there are clients for everything...and it'll work over a WAN, the internet, etc...not just a local LAN...which means we could have a collaborative worksession, despite Everyone in the club being spread out across New england and lower canada.

That said, I can't find any info about any editors that actually use Jabber yet, though...

We will see what happens when corporate AIM succeeds and im becomes pay. ;)

If this is really important to you, move all of you instant messaging to Jabber. If you're really hardcore about it, run a Jabber server on a box in your LAN. If you set it up correctly, you can run "gateways" or "agents" that allow you to use your Jabber clients to log onto other instant messaging networks, including the big 4 (ICQ, AIM, MSN, and Yahoo).

I use this in house when I set up instant messaging for clients as it's open source, it can run over the Internet, and there's no chance that the business model is going to change and start charging.

The same applies here as with any other netowrked communications...

Here's what I wrote in another thread:

If I actually care about something being secure, it's either done through SSH (or scp to copy files), or I use SSL encryption on my instant messaging, or PGP encrypted e-mails. I don't care if someone's able to tell who the recipient is and what the subject is. My ISP probably logs that anyway. Wireless networking as it is now supports all that and more. What's wrong with it then?

Definitely look into Jabber. The IETF recently got involved with it, and the official protocol name will be "XMPP". See the Jabber Software Foundation's website for more information and the full protocol specification (plus over 70 enhancement proposals).

As for a client, you should find one to your liking in the Jabber community. I am the author of Psi, which was recommended to you by another person in the thread. Though the program is incomplete, it is quite stable, and the requirements you list in your post are my thoughts exactly. Email me if you want to get involved ;-)

Btw, I noticed you marked yourself as a fan of me. What was the reason?

I used to like Jabber until I try and use it for more than 10 minutes at a time and whatever server I'm on, the connection over transports always fuctuates. I've tried many different servers, namely charente.de (now is a-message.de), jabber.org, rhymbox.com (which their website has the best client IMO, AIM-style as opposed to email box style ala WinJab), timic.com (where RhymBox's client is from) and more listed at http://www.jabber.org/user/publicservers.php . They work fine for 10 minutes and then magically everyone on my list goes offline.

I love Jabbers idea but something in the implentation never keeps me as a constant user. I just started RhymBox up at went to rhymbox.com and we'll see how it does overnight. I will try out Psi as well, it's downloading now.

Cryptography support.

Servers currently support SSL, and future versions will allow end-to-end encryption of the conversation itself.

Stability.

There are many different jabber clients. Some are more stable than others. Right now, I use Psi, which hasn't crashed on me once.

It should look nice and have a cool GUI.

Again, lots of different clients. I think Psi's GUI is nice. It certainly isn't as crufty as ICQ. But YMMV on this one.

It should be IM client, and nothing else.

Again, lots of clients to choose from. I don't know what kinds of features they may offer, but I'm sure there's bound to be one suited to you.

Portability.

Psi is written against QT and runs on Windows and linux. Not sure about other platforms, but I know there are Java clients out there that should run on nearly anything.

Zero tolerance policy on SPAM.

This would be up to the individual jabber server. The only thing I really got spam with is ICQ, though, which is why I don't use it. I don't get AIM spam since I stopped accepting messages from people not on my buddy list.

Support for modules.

This I'm not completely sure about. I know the SSL stuff for Psi is a drop in module. You just put the DLL (or .so if using linux) in the program's directory, and when you start back up, you have SSL available. An open protocol specification.

The jabber protocol is completely open and 100% free. Anyone who wants is able to not only write their own client, but also their own server. Anyone can download the reference server code and run their own, too. It's very nice.

A real revenue model, not based on ads or spyware.

How about just free?

A shiny retail box.

Can't help ya there.

Jabber apparently stacks up pretty well. :)

On another note, I am not sure most companies require IM on an enterprise level, to much to manage, not enough ROI. It makes sense on a department level, and on a department level you do not need much more than icq qroupware, oh yah, AOL owns that. Maybe a better solution would be jabber.

The biggest draw back of IM in the corporate environment: to easy for your boss to check if you are online. :)

I ran a Jabber server at work until corporate provided an IM solution. They chose IBM Lotus Sametime.

Without file transfers IM doesn't take much bandwidth. Think about it, messages of of a few dozen bytes only take 1 packet to send! No, you'd have to have hundreds of IMs to add up to a few piddly Kbps. Problem is allowing IM and diallowing file transfers. Or, as one poster stated, monitoring IM traffic. In that case, they could run their own jabberd server, and with firewall rules force users to use it. Since it's GPL/OS they should be able to modify the code to allow "snooping", if jabberd doesn't already.

And I thought I got pissed when File Sharing didn't work through the MSN Jabber Transport @ jabber.at.

Is this the end of Specially modified MIRC DCC server software as we know it?. Isn't DCC a direct connection to the client, not through the Network?. (Because they say that DCC won't work through firewalls). Ahh the days of hanging around in #(anonymous) typing !list, finding something interesting it and triggering the connection by typing !(trigger name) or /ctcp (nick name) (trigger name)

"Now if you will download Exodus and sign up at jabber.org, we can get back to trading pr0n again!"

I don't think I'll bother to register with /chanserv again.

Jabber. F**k those other protocols

Jabber is normally thought of as yet another IM system, but "Jabber is an open XML protocol for the real-time exchange of messages and presence between any two points on the Internet" (from the Jabber site). Its first application has been IM, but it is by no means limited to IM. Jabber is a protocol specification, and there are several open and closed source implementations of clients and servers.

xmlBlaster is a more traditional MOM offering, under LGPL. It supports numerous protocols and bindings into a number of languages.

As usual, Google offers a lot of advice on the topic of 'mom middleware "open source"', including a list of MOM implementations which tells us that JORAM is also open source, and an article entitle Open Source in Middleware.

Incoming phone calls are WAY more expensive than page views or incoming email.

What about incoming instant messages?

The Jabber Software Foundation has set up a site to help coordinate and serve as a discussion area and repository for claims, including a patent lawyer's interpretation.

The Jabber Software Foundation has set up a site to help coordinate and serve as a discussion area and repository for claims, including a patent lawyer's interpretation.

The Jabber Software Foundation has set up a site to help coordinate and serve as a discussion area and repository for claims, including a patent lawyer's interpretation.

Does IM have an open standard that can be impleneted on every available platofrm?

Yes.

Horde. The only hole they have for your project is for IRC, but I'm bet it could be integrated from Jabber readily.

Someone told you to use Jabber and they are right because it has already been done. Jabber servers have several plugins that allow you to do MSN, AOL, Yahoo!, IRC, Jabber and a couple other lesser known protocols. Most Jabber clients will support the major protocols and are available on numerous platforms. You can setup public or private servers so I think you already have your answer on that one.

Have you read the SOAP 1.2 specification lately? Nevermind the XML Schema and HTTP 1.1 specifications which SOAP also uses. These specs are far from "simple". SOAP seems to be slowly turning into an XML version of CORBA. XMLRPC, on the other hand, is simple. The Jabber protocol is even simpler yet - no HTTP transport. Something that starts off simple is usually transformed into something quite different after committees of software development firms get a hold of it. It's in their interest to keep the barrier to entry high.

Incidentally, if I had my employees using IM for intra-company communications I would damn well want them encrypting their communications. Do you really want company data going through some untrusted external server?

Not all IM solutions require use of an external server when talking to folks outside the company. See Jabber.

• Wouldn't it be conceptually easy to map an AIM name, say, HotSw33tie, to the ID HotSw33tie@aol.com, and the MSN Messenger name GatezRox to GatezRox@msn.com and so on? [...]

So yes, AOL or someone else could set up a bunch of public Jabber gateway server stoday that accepted connections to aol.com. The main problem is the impedance mismatch between the AIM protocol and the Jabber protocol. Jabber supports offline deferred delivery of messages, for example; AIM does not.

• And does this whole setup mean that I can run my own IM host? As in, I can be BadAssBob@bobshost.com? No external service necessary? I can IM WimpAssFred@wimpybox.com just like that, no centralized server necessary? Just like email?

• Wouldn't it be conceptually easy to map an AIM name, say, HotSw33tie, to the ID HotSw33tie@aol.com, and the MSN Messenger name GatezRox to GatezRox@msn.com and so on? [...]

So yes, AOL or someone else could set up a bunch of public Jabber gateway server stoday that accepted connections to aol.com. The main problem is the impedance mismatch between the AIM protocol and the Jabber protocol. Jabber supports offline deferred delivery of messages, for example; AIM does not.

• And does this whole setup mean that I can run my own IM host? As in, I can be BadAssBob@bobshost.com? No external service necessary? I can IM WimpAssFred@wimpybox.com just like that, no centralized server necessary? Just like email?

Today there are a bunch of competing networks -- AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo! and, to a lesser extent, Groove -- none of which interoperate at the protocol level. There is no infrastructure counterpart to SMTP, RFC-822, MIME etc.

XMPP, aka Jabber, is the IM counterpart to SMTP, conceptually -- it's a unified protocol that IM software needs to standardize on -- as well as technologically: it's an asynchronous, routed, queuing messaging protocol. XMPP leverages RFC-822 for addressing, MIME and HTML for content, and further refines the SMTP idea by adding an extensible syntax (XML with namespaces), presence, persistent connections, deferral metadata, named services, group chat, file transfer etc.

To say that XMPP exists for interoperability is like saying HTTP exists for interoperability. XMPP isn't really the glue that could tie proprietary IM networks together, although it certainly does that, too.

Not incidentally, to get started with Jabber, pick up the best Jabber client for Linux/Windows/MacOS X and register with one of the free public Jabber servers. The account setup takes about 10 seconds and is done through the program.

This will fill you in a bit on the differences between .org and .com server http://www.jabber.org/admin/serverlist.php

and yup, gotta call em for price.

There are a couple dozen free and comercial jabber clients available. You are not restricted in which client you use. Clients exist that run on any platform that supports perl, or java. Other clients exist that will only run on a Gnome or KDE desktop. Or only Windows.

Take a look at the list of clients available under the client list at jabber.org or even some of the links under that.

Don't sell the comercial server short either. The evaluation copy may expire in a month, however it does support some features that are not in the open/free version of the server.

-Rusty

There are a couple dozen free and comercial jabber clients available. You are not restricted in which client you use. Clients exist that run on any platform that supports perl, or java. Other clients exist that will only run on a Gnome or KDE desktop. Or only Windows.

Take a look at the list of clients available under the client list at jabber.org or even some of the links under that.

Don't sell the comercial server short either. The evaluation copy may expire in a month, however it does support some features that are not in the open/free version of the server.

-Rusty