Jabber

A lot of people don’t know about Jabber and its awesome. So, why do I, and a whole lot of geeks, have such hard-ons for this?

A) It’s an open protocol.

This may not sound like anything you want to care about. But you should. The advantage of an open protocol is fairly straightforward: People know how it works. The protocol can’t do anything sneaky or insecure or just plain crummy to your IMs without a ton of nerds getting their back up and telling everyone.

B)  It’s a feature-filled protocol.

Pretty much any feature can be built into an XMPP client or server. Voice chat, doodle boards, webcam, anything. And, because the protocol is smart, clients downgrade gracefully. A client that supports a feature won’t hammer you with a thousand error messages, or even worse, not connect to you, if you don’t support the feature too.

C) The big boys are supporting it.

AOL has announced that they’ll be allowing people to connect to their service using Jabber clients. They already have an alpha server up and have stated they’re dedicated to getting a real server up and working “soon”. Granted, “soon” is a long time sometimes, but still.