This Friday has been proposed as Open Discussion Day to promote the use of open standards for digital communication by not using proprietary instant messaging systems. I may not be able to participate due to having to communicate with people for work.

There is an open standard we all use called email. It allows any internet user to communicate with any other regardless of their ISP, operating system or email software.

Instant messaging is another matter. There are lots of competing systems such as Microsoft's MSN Messenger, ICQ and AOL's AIM. As far as I am aware these cannot talk to each other so if you have friends on different systems you need to run multiple clients. Each jealously protects it's protocol, in part to make sure users can only use their client software with it's associated advertising. I've only really used MSN and although the client has lots of tricks up it's sleeve for graphic and noises I find it very annoying to use.

There is an alternative to this mess. Jabber has been around for about six years as an open standard. Anyone can run a server or write a client for it that suits their needs. There are plenty of public servers that allow you to create an account for free. Free client software is availble for just about any platform. My preferences are Psi on Windows and Kopete on Linux. If your friends insist on using the proprietary systems then there are 'transports' available on some Jabber servers that allow you to talk to them from your Jabber client. You won't get all their 'winks', 'shakes' or other annoyances, just the text and possibly their smilies. If you want your messaging to be secure then there are options to use SSL to the server and even GPG encryption.

The only major protocol that cannot link to Jabber is Skype unless that has changed recently. Work is ongoing to implement the Google Talk voice protocol on other clients. There are also other open VOIP protocols.

The easiest way to get onto the Jabber network is to use Google Talk. This uses Jabber for IM. It can also be used from Gmail in a browser, but may require you to select US English as the language.

If you want to try it out then set up an account somewhere and contact me as 'steevc' at either gmail.com or netmindz.net.