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.

iTunes chat

[Dixie_Flatline]

My sister got involved in this one day while she was sitting around in an office at her university.

She and her friend were both working on their laptops, and they both had iTunes opened. They were sharing their playlists, and came across a playlist with some good music (belonging to someone that I'll name GuybrushT). Clever person that she is, she changed the name of HER playlist to say 'GuybrushT is cool!'. He noticed, and she and her friend and GuybrushT had a conversation, all in their shared playlist names!

Your other alternative is, of course, to buy yourself an iBook and just give in to Apple and OS X. It's a pretty cheap way to buy an addition to your social life.

It's somewhat open

[eyeball]

I'm no expert in rendezvous, but it uses open (although not too commonly used) protocols like multicast-DSN. See Apples FAQ on Rendezvous

As for iChat LAN (which I'm pretty sure is much different than AOL's protocol). Looks like these guys reverse engineered and built a LAN iChat plugin for Proteus (the multiprotocol IM client). They have the source available for download.

It would be possible to port the rendezvous+iChat protocol to a Jabber server plugin.

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.