Cross-Platform Blabber With Jabber Instant Messenger

Talk to other instant-messaging users on other systems with JIM.

Joel Strauch, special to PCWorld.com

Instant messaging is one of the quickest and easiest ways to chat with friends. The problem is, everyone you talk with uses different clients--Mom likes America Online's AIM, your sister prefers ICQ, and your boss uses Microsoft's MSN Messenger. To chat with them, you need all three services up and running on your PC.

An open-source development project with the goal of creating an open instant messaging system, Jabber Instant Messenger is intended to let you chat not only with other Jabber users but also with users of AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger.

When I began testing, I successfully used JIM to communicate with all four of the other services, albeit not with complete reliability. Since then, AOL has blocked interoperability between Jabber's server and the AIM service, making it impossible to communicate with AIM users through JIM.

JIM isn't the first instant messaging service that's tried to play nice with others. The Internet Engineering Task Force has been working for some time to create a single instant messaging standard, or at least provide a way for all the messaging services to communicate with one another. Despite the IETF's efforts, AOL has resisted cooperating and has kept its approximately 84 million AIM users from chatting with those on other IM services, including its own ICQ.

Cross-Chat Capability--Perhaps

You'll find Jabber clients for Linux, Mozilla, Palm, and Windows 9x/NT/2000/Me at Jabber.com. Since the software is open source, developers have also created many other clients at Jabber.org.

We took the latest Windows version (build 1.5.0.6.1) of the free JIM client for a spin. You can grab the latest build from our Downloads library.

With JIM you can hold a one-on-one chat with another user or create a multiple-participant text conference, with any combination of ICQ, MSN, and Yahoo users. JIM's interface, reminiscent of AIM's, includes a tree in which you can sort your list of contacts by category. Toolbar buttons handle basic functions such as adding and finding contacts and changing your online status.

Jabber recently added file transfer and text formatting to JIM's list of abilities. Like ICQ's history feature, JIM's log files let you save the contents of individual conversations. But JIM doesn't have as many advanced features as ICQ, or even AIM. JIM lacks ICQ's "invisible" status, which lets you appear to be offline to everyone but the users you designate.

One trait that annoyed me was new message windows' tendency to pop up on top of all my other windows, interrupting my work. Luckily, after a little digging through the preferences section, I was able to turn that feature off.

Chatting with users from other messenger services requires setting up a gateway with that service. To do so, you must open JIM's Gateway setting in the Tools menu to sign up for an account with each instant messaging service. Then, you enter your account name and password.

It took a couple of tries to set up the gateways for MSN Messenger and ICQ--I had to activate each several times and add my ICQ contacts more than once. JIM automatically added some of my contacts for MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger when I added those gateways. You'll need to check that all your contacts have been imported, because the process doesn't work predictably. Once all of your IM accounts are activated, Jabber automatically connects to those servers at start-up.

Jabber's not a perfect service, but it definitely has its advantages for users who have contacts spread across several IM worlds. I'll definitely keep Jabber Instant Messenger installed on my system, but I'll also keep the other messengers ready for backup.