Get on Jabber

It’s bad enough that AIM has been utterly unreliable this week, but what most of you probably don’t know is the likely reason for the brokenness. AOL is trying to kill interoperability of other messaging systems with AIM. So far GAIM and Jabber have occasionally been able to work around the restrictions, but AOL keeps moving the targets. I strongly suspect that in so doing they have broken their own official clients. If they’re going to play that way, I don’t want to play with them. Unx suggested getting on MSN Messenger; I have a better suggestion that’s not run by an evil empire: go register with Jabber. It’s open, free, and interoperates with Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, and (sometimes) AIM if you have accounts on those systems.