Cross-platform, Easy-to-Use Local LAN Chat?

Ars-Gonzo asks: "I was at a conference last week, and had a surprising number of people connected to a peer-to-peer wireless LAN during the lectures. I saw several Mac users typing away during the lectures, and I found out later that they were using iChat's Rendezvous-based local chat to talk to each other. iChat's local subnet chatting functionality is supposedly based on Jabber, but I can't get a Jabber client (on Windows or Linux) to connect to iChat, locally. Has anyone seen any iChat compatible LAN-chat apps for a platform other than Mac?"

Comments

Probably not Jabber-based

[mrpuffypants]

I'm going to argue that iChat's LAN chatting mechanism probably isn't based upon Jabber at all. Jabber is a server that clients all connect to, whereas Rendezvous is a true P2P technology, where everybody connects to everybody else.

And good luck on getting 3rd-party support for other protocols in iChat. Apple's got that bolted down to AIM and Local LAN chatting.

Re:Searched - Eimp

[Cyberop5]

it only seems to support Rendezvous discovery. I can see my other system online, but I cannot chat with it. This is very buggy software. I can't remove persons on my contact list either, even if i create them. I can however, see their status. IOW, Eimp has a ways to go.