What is Jabber and why do I care?
Jabber is an open alternative to consumer IM services. Unlike these commercial services, Jabber is a decentralized network. It works similar to email servers in which anyone can download the Jabber server application and run it in their server to offer Jabber. Because of this, there is no global username, there is unique usernames on each server thus you can have multiple jabber accounts on different servers. The username is in the form of an email address. So, if I get a jabber account at jabberserverx.com then my jabber username would be myusername@jabberserverx.com. Each Jabber server can be configured differently to offer support for MSN, ICQ, AIM, IRC, Yahoo, Email Gateway and even File Transfer. You can find a grid of the Jabber servers and its supported protocols here. Why should you care about this? You should care because it’s open, free and it’s seems to be the only way to bring Yahoo and MSN Messenger into iChat. Step 1: Get your account set up If you don’t have an MSN or Ya
