jabber

IM+ takes all the fuss out of mobile instant messaging by enabling you to connect to your Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger, AIM, Facebook, and other IM accounts, all from a single application window. With its clean design and simple user interface, chatty folks on the go may wonder how they ever lived without it.

Under the Contacts tab, all of your contacts are compiled in a single list. That way, you don't have to bother with switching among accounts in order to chat. In fact, once you're on IM+, you should feel absolutely no distinction between the different … Read more

Despite intense popularity of the BitTorrent system, Gnutella clients aren't dead yet. LimeWire 5 for Windows, Mac, and Linux keeps its hand in the file-sharing pot by borrowing your Google contacts to create a friend network and a snazzy redesign that surfaces the most important information first.

If you're not a fan of the Gnutella file-sharing protocols, I doubt this will be enough to grab your eye. Torrents run faster, depending on the number of seeders, and torrent content is rarely faked in the way that plagues the Gnutella networks. If LimeWire lights you up, though, there's … Read more

Cisco Systems is bolstering its unified communications and collaboration portfolio with the purchase of a corporate instant-messaging company.

On Friday, the networking giant announced it will purchase Jabber, which uses an open-source IM and presence protocol used by Google Talk and Gizmo. The company didn't disclose financial details.

In essence, Jabber's technology allows multiple IM platforms to "talk" to each other. This means that it allows people using tools such as Microsoft Office Communications Server, IBM Sametime, AOL AIM, and Google to send messages to each and get presence information about one another.

Jabber's technology … Read more

In a sign that open source has truly gone mainstream, Cisco Systems forgot to mention that Jabber is an open-source messaging company when it announced the acquisition of Jabber on Friday.

Indeed, the real news centers around Cisco's growing battle with Microsoft over collaboration, as Larry Dignan points out over at ZDNet. Open source? That's just necessary plumbing, apparently. Indeed, even Jabber hardly mentions open source throughout its Web site, preferring instead to focus on "open standards."

This is appropriate, since Jabber has never been about 100 percent open-source solutions. The company uses open Jabber technologies, … Read more

Your mother uses AOL Instant Messenger. Your spouse prefers MSN. Your office insists on Yahoo. Your ex is on MySpaceIM (shudder). What are you going to do? You could run all those chat clients at once, or you could use the multichat protocol app formerly known as Gaim: Pidgin, available for Windows, Linux, and in a portable Windows version. Like Trillian, Fire, and other third-party IM clients, this open-source messaging application lets you access multiple IM networks from one window, including Google Talk and ICQ as well as lesser-known protocols such as Jabber and Gadu-Gadu.

Pidgin's IM features are … Read more

Facebook Chat might've had a simple and quiet launch, but a month later, the social network is already announcing plans to upgrade.

Engineer David Reiss announced Tuesday evening on the Facebook Developer Blog that Facebook Chat will soon have an Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) interface--that's better known as Jabber. This will mean that external clients will be able to incorporate Facebook Chat, currently restricted in most cases to the browser.

Universal IM clients Digsby (which is PC-only) and Adium (which is Mac-only) have already worked in ways to support Facebook Chat.

Through Facebook's official Jabber … Read more

Google Talk users have yet another way to chat with their Gtalk buddies. The new "labs edition" which was quietly released on Friday brings to your desktop several features that previously could only be found in the Web version. Most importantly, the group chat feature which made its way into the Web version of Google Talk last year, yet was oddly missing from the desktop application until now. Also new to the desktop version are emoticons and notifications from Gmail and Google Calendar, as well as Google's hot-in-Brazil social network Orkut.

Oddly enough, with these extra features … Read more

Google yesterday announced in its Talkabout product blog that there's a new way to connect your site or social page visitors directly to you: a Google Talk chatback widget that instantly connects the visitor to your GTalk or Jabber IM client.

I like giving my readers a chance to connect with me directly in real-time, so I'm all about products like this. But the implementation of this little product is so lightweight and so lacking, that I understand perfectly why even the Google blog post announcing it shows only a picture of the widget instead of a live … Read more