This entry on The Unofficial Apple Weblog, contains two interesting links. There's a link to a News.com article that says a new TOS is in the works. The second link is to eWeek and includes an attorney's take on the wording of the current TOS. Assuming there actually is a TOS change, that give a temporary repreive.

But back to Jabber/XMPP, which is really the important issue here. Peter Saint-Andre has summarized a lot of the blog stuff on Jabber in relation to the AOL thing. In regard to my posting, he said:

I agree, except that it's always the time to push for greater Jabber adoption. :-)

The reason that I wrote my post is that people that are entrenched in an existing system need a reason to get off. Sometimes they need a shock to the system (Thomas Barnett would call this a 'System Perturbation') in order to wake them up. The AOL flipflap provides such an event. The question is, will the energy created by this get channelled into usable Jabber clients, reliable and scalable Jabber server software, and trustable Jabber services? Peter's closing comment gives me hope.

There is much to agree with in the concerns expressed by people who want to adopt Jabber technologies for IM: we need friendlier clients, more reliable servers, stronger security, better identity management (vCard++), easier ways to find people on the network, and more straightforward user-registration features. We need to focus on these priorities and deliver software that solves the problems with existing codebases. So as always that means rolling up our sleeves and getting back to work.

There's one other thing that's needed. I need a list of recommended clients, servers, and hosts running trustworthy Jabber servers. If I'm going to start telling people in my buddy list that they need to switch to Jabber, I need to be able to tell them which download link to click, and what to put in for their server id.

Right now, my list looks like this:

Clients:
Mac OS X: Adium
Linux: gaim
Windows: ?

Server software:
?

Jabber server:
jabber.org

Suggestions/improvements for this list welcome, but I'm only interested in having one entry in each category. Leave a comment.