blog » October 13, 2005/Instant Messaging grab bag

A few instant messaging news items and links:

Microsoft and Yahoo! may be merging their IM networks. (/., Sneakin’s blog, Peter Saint-Andre) This will allow users of MSN Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger to communicate with each other. Why not just go all the way, and just use Jabber? (Because then they would lose control of their networks, and they would actually have to play nice with other people.)

This guy is complaining about the lack of modern features in Linux IM clients. (/.) Modern features such as nudging. <shudder> On the other hand, I do agree with the fact that the free IM interfaces are missing certain important features. None of the Jabber transports support file transfers yet. Jabber doesn’t yet have an established voice/video protocol, or whiteboarding protocol. Or even end-to-end encryption and signatures. Or even a standard way of setting avatars. One bad thing about being an open standard is that adding new features takes longer.

Apparently, there’s a Christian IM network now. (Sneakin’s blog) As a Christian myself, all I can say is: huh? Why do you need to create a separate Christian IM network?

Update @ 17:15 -0400: Google has hired the main Gaim developer. (Gaim news, /.) Apparently this means that work is being done on making Google Talk’s voice features accessible to other Jabber clients. (gaim-vv is also being merged into the mainline Gaim tree.)