We all know about Google talk now. IM and VOIP and hoping to integrate SIP soon. 900k installer for the app. Nice and lightweight.
The use of XMPP as the protocol will at last make Jabber mainstream. Russ Beatie tells us succinctly why this is good:
I don’t know if you know how it works, but it’s pretty wild. You don’t send individual XML documents per message, instead you open up a socket and start writing one XML document keeping the socket open the entire time, as you need to send more messages, you keep adding XML stanzas to the document. You do this both on the up and down stream … if you’re really just sending a never-ending XML document as the way to make a conversation, then extending this protocol is drop-dead simple. … *Poof* – extensible instant messaging and presence. They’ve got a ton of extension proposals already in the works, including sending forms, multi-user chat, and geolocation.
This is why open protocols rock.