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

Posted by Cliff on Monday March 29, 2004 @01:11PM from the simple-communication dept.

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?"

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Probably not Jabber-based by mrpuffypants · 2004-03-29 14:00 · Score: 4, Informative

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.