No. I’ve got lots of friends there — some I know in real life, and some are just acquaintance on the net. However, there are also some — usually with weird email addresses — kept on be-friending me and trying to get me to add them into my contact. I do not wish to know what will happen if I approve their request so I usually just discard them, but it’s now getting more and more annoying. Just this morning I have to discard 18 such requests. Friends and spammers… Hmm sorry friends. Spammers made me do it! I am no longer a user of MSN Messenger.

The only IM that I am using regularly now is probably Jabber/Google Talk. Recently I migrated this domain to Google Apps, and now Gtalk is the XMPP server for yang.id.au. So feel free to add me if you are using Gtalk or Jabber. You can find my JID at the contact page.

Wait a minute. Google What? Or am I the only one who could not remember that promising Jabber/XMPP-powered Windows-based chat client?

Google Talk has actually had a lot of improvement since its launch one year ago. File sharing. Integration with Gmail, etc. They have also been “federated” with many other Jabber servers. The latest version is quite a nice and clean app without feature bloat like almost every other IM clients.

However, the problem is, where are the users? None of my contacts uses Google Talk.

I wrote about Google Talk exactly one year ago. I was excited, and I concluded “Oh yeah. Time to dump Skype :)”. 12 months later, I am still using Skype because of its video capability, despite proprietary P2P protocol. I still can’t call SIP numbers, nor land-line numbers from Google Talk. I have no one to talk to on Google Talk — no wonder it has not been fired up last couple of months.

I am still using my home Jabber server to talk to my other IM correspondents on various networks. One observation I had over this year is, my ICQ “buddies” are never on-line, and most of them are using MSN now (aargh!!). The success of an IM network still rests on the size of its user community, no matter how bloat and ads-infested your IM software is.

Has its VoIP protocol been analysed and documented somewhere? I wonder whether Google would stick to the standard and use SIP/SIMPLE setup.

Some other questions of mine:

• Would it support XMPP’s inter-server protocol, so Jabber users on other servers can chat with Google Talk users?
• How does Google Talk fit into Google’s overall strategy? What is the bottom line?
• Will we see contextual targeted ads popped up in the middle of a conversation, when Google Talk detected certain keywords?

More to come…

Update: Found some of my answers on Google Talk’s developer info.

5. What protocols are used for voice calls?

Google Talk supports a custom XMPP-based signaling protocol and peer-to-peer communication mechanism. We will fully document this protocol. In the near future, we plan to support SIP signaling.

So the voice is actually embedded inside XMPP’s XML packets at the moment, streaming across HTTP proxy. Not very efficient I’ll say :) But it does manage to penetrate through our firewall.

There are also heaps of info on that page. It says at the bottom of the page:

3. Do you plan to support the Google Talk client on other platforms?

We look forward to the Google Talk client supporting Linux and Mac OSX in the future.

Oh yeah. Time to dump Skype :)

For the last 16 months (Jan 2003 to Apr 2004), I have sent out 6,654 messages and received 8,374. The top 5 senders and top 5 recipients are in the same order, which makes sense as instant message is designed for two way communication, and I don’t have really annoying people high on the list. The top 5 consists 64% of my total conversation. Two are in MBF, another one in Pelita, and another one my high school friend. Yeah. You all know who you are, always trying to disturb me during working hours!! :) And surprisingly Vivian my wife is my No. 4 correspondent! She must have sent a lot of messages from her desk to my desk at home.

Another interesting fact is that 92% of my messages are from ICQ and 8% are from MSN. Zero from Yahoo so I actually ended up not using it. Yahoo gateway on my Jabber server is not very stable anyway. Does the imbalance between ICQ and MSN messages indicate anything? As of distribution of the months, I found June 2003 marked the busiest for unknown reason. December 2003 and February 2004 are my the low seasons in chatting on IM, probably due to quiet Christmas in Dec ’03 and busy moving house in Feb ’04.

I guess this kind of statistics would be even more interesting if I can get the full chat history of my last 7 and half years on ICQ. Too bad there is no way I can recover them :(

There are alternatives, but none of them feels “native” to Mac OS X. I can get some X11 client (gaim for example) compiled to run under Panther’s X11.app, but that does not feel integrated. The closest one is probably Psi for Mac OS X, which runs with the need of X11, and it is the one that I am currently using. However, a ported Qt/C++ application can never feel the same as a native Cocoa app. Even though it has Aqua-looking buttons and scroll bars, it just lacks that Mac OS X native feel attaching to it. While it is very functional and powerful, it still feels like a ported Windows app…

But I guess I can’t really complain when I can do nothing to contribute. I am still waiting for that ultimate native Jabber client for Mac OS X…

James Bunton has just announced a new version of MSN Transport for Jabber, 1.2.8pre3, that supports MSN8 authentication protocol. Immediately I downloaded and applied to my server at work, and so far it has been working fine (after 20 minutes). I don’t get the “reminder” message from MSN anymore, and I have no problem logging and and chatting with my contacts on MSN. Hopefully it will continue to work after MSN’s dead line. Cheers to all the open source Jabber developers who have worked on this patch!

On a related note, Yahoo Messenger is also sending me reminders about installing the latest version of their product. By the way, I am also connected to the Yahoo network using Jabber… There appears to be a simple fix on the mailing list. I might give that a try later.

You are running a version of messenger that requires an immediate security update. Please visit http://messenger.msn.com/Help/Upgrades.aspx to complete the update.

Upgrade to what?! Currently I am connected to the MSN network using Jabber‘s MSN transport (from my previous blog entry), which will probably not work after Microsoft turned off the support for the older protocols. The next generation MSN transport is nowhere near ready, just by browsing their CVS repository, and the current suggestion from Jabber is (quoted from their website):

This is a good time to convince your company to switch to Jabber which represents a more flexible and secure messaging solution.

Well, there is not a single person I know personally that has got a Jabber account. The very reason that I am still using MSN is that many friends of mine are on that particular network. So I do not think asking people to switch to Jabber is a sound solution.

So I have a few options. I can either download MSN Messenger 6.0 for Windows (and an equivalent for my Mac) and use it, or I can simply wait for an updated MSN transport for Jabber to come up, at the cost of being disconnected. Or I can try to brush up my C skill by hacking the MSN transport myself. Hmm. Maybe not…

Links

• Andrew Sayers is calling programmers to work on the new MSN transport for Jabber.
• Research on MSN8/9 protocol that is used in MSN Messenger 6. Sounds like it has pretty tricky authentication system.

Yuk!

And I hate the original clients. Most of them are full of useless bells and whistles that you will never touch. They all pop up advertise, and they all try to make your desktop their own. A few things I have tried previously…

Trillian – a good looking IM client that supports AIM, ICQ, Yahoo and MSN. Nice support of different protocols. Reasonably stable. Good looking skins. However, there are some bugs that really annoys me. It hogs memory. It’s history support is pretty basic – all the previous conversations are stored in a plain text file. Vivian is still using it, but I have abandoned it and moved on.

Miranda ICQ – a nice small ICQ client. It is actually probably the best ICQ client I have used because of its plugin architecture that lets many developers contribute their bits and pieces to form an extremely functional Mirabils ICQ replacement. It also has integrated MSN support for a while, as well as a recently developed Yahoo protocol plugin. It is light in memory consumption, and its plain interface suits me well. I have been using Miranda ICQ for more than a year now, and I am still using it at the moment. However, besides ICQ protocol, none of the other protocols support SOCK5 proxy. It’s proprietary single-binary-file database format also scares me – what happens if it gets corrupted? Moreover, I think I have found something more suitable for me….

Jabber.

For the past few days, I have been using Just Another Jabber Client to connect to my work’s Jabber 1.4.2 server, running MSN Transport, ICQ Transport, Yahoo Transport and AIM Transport (even though I am not using AIM). Jabber is now the gateway to all my IM needs as it handles all the protocols/interfaces I need, centrally. JAJC is nice – good looking, implemented all the features I need (and all the features that I don’t need), Unicode supports and yet stay low in memory usage. Jabber protocol is also open – you can implement you own server side features easily, and there are bindings for many different programming languages.

I feel satisfied now :)

Updated 5 April: I’ve changed the URL for JAJC. Jabber.ru seems to be dead at the moment, and I just realised that there is a new URL for that excellent Jabber client.