Yesterday , like everybody else and their dogs, noted that Google rolled out a chat service built on top of the Jabber protocol. Today, I would like to throw in my two cents into why I think this is a good thing.
I've long thought that the Jabber protocol was much more flexible and generally better thought out than either AOL's or Yahoo's or MSN's.... and I've longed for these services to interoperate. Yesterday was a baby step toward interoperation. Google is mainstream. Google adopting the Jabber protocol should help to push the Jabber protocol into the main stream. In my wildest fantastical dreams, I could see Yahoo!, MSN, and AOL eventually adopting the Jabber protocol as well. The next step would be the agreement on a standard file transfer protocol, followed by the migration to Apple's video and audio chat protocols. Yeah I think Apple's video and audio are that much better than anything else out there - though I haven't tried the
Gizmo project yet, they are certainly better than
Skype. Now, the only thing Apple needs to do to speedup this revolution is to release iChat for Windows and Linux... oh yeah, and some better Jabber support would be a plus too.
