New Trillian Supports Jabber!
Finally the new beta of Trillian supports Jabber! I'm a big Trillian fan because of it's great support for both IRC and all the IM apps (AOL, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ), but it's always been a huge lack that it didn't do Jabber, which is surprising because it's a relatively simple spec that's completely open. The newest beta changes that with a Jabber plug in that *just works* (once you find it).
This is great from a couple of standpoints. First, I really like the idea of Jabber - local IM servers like you have local email servers, but I've never been *that* excited enough to run a separate client along with Trillian, which handled everything else. Now that it's integrated, it's fantastic.
But the biggest thing is that ALL JABBER CLIENTS SUCK, so this news is fantastic from that view. Finally now Jabber has a client that it deserves. Though, I really hope that Trillian promotes Jabber to the same level as ICQ or AIM in the UI because I couldn't find how to enable the Jabber options at first without a hint from Erik. Once you've added the plugin, it works perfectly and seemlessly in the app. It'd be a shame if it was hidden like that in the gold app.
Jabber is a really, really great spec. After implementing my own client, I really have a great respect for it. Clients are the key, however, and this is a good step (though I'm not sure how mainstream Trillian really is...). Jabber - in my humble opinion - has a great future ahead of it in custom corporate IM solutions as well as in mobile chat apps. And I think there's a little focused-on opportunity for Jabber to take over where IRC is now (without the wackiness of server-splits, etc.)
I've had a jabber server running on my box for months now without touching it. Now happily it'll be easy to point people at Trillian as a client in the future when I want to use Jabber for something cool...
-Russ