So all you Google Talk users can now add andrewjrallan @ jabber.org (and any other jabber contact to your Google Talk contacts list, and can join in with all the rest of us!

Good work Google – even if it did take a while! Who wants to bet which of the remaining IM networks will be the next to federate to the Jabber network?

(Man of many talents, etc.)

Google are using a recognised standard (namely XMPP), rather than doing a Microsoft and inventing their own standard. So that means that I don’t have to use their client (or wait for a Linux version), I can go ahead and use my existing client and use Google Talk and my jabber.org account at the same time. Oooh, warm fuzzy feeling – open standards are good.

The catch (for there is one, of course) is that google aren’t allowing messages from their server to any other server. Normally jabber servers can talk to one another, so that you can pick any server (or run your own!) without having to worry about which server your friends are using. Google have made themselves an island, cut off from the rest of the jabber network, and are talking about creating a federalised network of trust or some such nonsense. So they have basically leveraged XMPP (”hey, we hardly need bother writing a client”), whilst turning their backs on the idea behind open messaging. So I have my jabber contacts, and my Google Talk contacts, and never the twain shall intercommunicate. Shame.

Hopefully Google will smell the roses and open up s2s links, but I doubt they will.

(gravitystorm at gmail dot com (until I get bored of Google Talk), or prefarably andrewjrallan at jabber dot org )

I found today that Psi and OpenOffice.org have installed themselves quite weirdly – i.e. they’ve added themselves to the startup folder as a network path (\cs-cxgeneral6\c$\blah), instead of a local path (C:\blah). Which explains why Psi pops up no matter what machine I log on to. It took me worryingly long to realise what was going on. I’m contemplating doing a similar thing for Firefox and Thunderbird, but I’ve no idea what that would do to my Firefox and Thunderbird profiles.

Ho Hum.

Next step: Persuade the Powers That Be to include them in the standard College desktop builds…

In our flat, well, my current flat and my previous flat next door, we’re running our own Jabber server for in-house communications. That means that we can still message each other when the Internet connection goes down – and me being in a different house (we’ve got an ethernet cable swinging between windows) means that it’s not quite as lazy as it seems. So that’s quite useful.

Also, a new version of Psi has come out, and amongst other things, now supports file transfer. A couple of other Jabber clients have done file-transfer for a few years now, but generally by coming up with their own way of doing it. Now that all the file-transfer protocols have been officially standardised, Psi has added it to its repertoire. I’m not holding my breath for anyone to implement file-transfer on the cross-network transports though!

I use Jabber for instant messaging, not MSN or ICQ or Yahoo or anything else. Well, that’s not entirely accurate, since I’ve been having a problem with it for the last few weeks. Not long after I got back, the MSN transport that I was using seems to have packed up, and it hasn’t reappeared. Transports to proprietary networks (proprietary = bad, mkay?) aren’t exactly the most reliable of things anyway, as I’ve discussed previously, so it’s not all that surprising. And I’ve heard Microsoft have been messing around over the last few months trying to stop this kind of thing anyway. So recently, I’ve only been messaging other people on Jabber.

So really, I haven’t been using it for IM at all, since I don’t know anyone else who uses Jabber often. So why have I stuck to it? Stubbornness, mainly, with a bit of ideology thrown in. But there is one over-riding reason – it’s called JabRSS and it’s the perfect fusion of two high-geek-factor technologies. I’ve added 37 RSS (huh?) feeds to it, mainly blogs that I read. It then sends me a jabber message when they get updated – it sent 411 headlines in the last 7 days. So that saves me soooo much time trawling around the web checking for updated sites – the updates come to me, and I can see if I want to read the rest of the article in question. Nice. If you keep track of lots of sites, and especially if you swap between lots of computers (and therefore a dedicated RSS reader is a bit of a hassle), then I’d recommend it.

Anyway, today I managed to persuade someone (with no important sounding position ) to sign up to Jabber, so if you decide to do so, you’ll probably already know both of us. And for the foreseeable future, it’s about the only way you’re going to be able to message me. andrewjrallan@jabber.org is the jabberid to add to your contact list.

(And for those of you who are on my contact list but don’t use Jabber any more, I’m interested to know why you’ve stopped.)