It ain't pretty being easy... (soopageek) wrote,
It ain't pretty being easy...
soopageek

chat bullshit

've always hated the "commercial" IM networks. I hate the business model that Yahoo and AOL use; the proprietary nature of their chat networks to further their brand and generate advertisement revenue. Actually, I hate just about anything which is proprietary. They refuse to make their networks "open" so that other clients can access them and users can communicate across multiple chat networks. They force their users to either get all of their friends on their proprietary network or run multiple chat clients, rather than allowing their users to choose their client because it's "the best" or they prefer it. I actually sorta like the MSN chat client and its lack of advertising but I hate Microsoft's tactics of tying it to programs like Outlook Express. I hate that you can't have one without the other. A couple of years ago, I messed around with Jabber clients, but found it to be too much of a bother. For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, Jabber is an open-source approach to instant messaging. Anyone can run a Jabber server and anyone can create clients which utilize it.

I'm starting to think that LiveJournal's new LJ Talk (based on Jabber), along with the rise of Google Talk (which is also based on open standards) is a sign that it's time for me to give it another go. The only way we'll ever rid ourselves of these proprietary networks is if we make it obvious to the perpetrators of it that, as consumers, we want open standards.

I know that my revelation is nothing new and that there are many of my friends who have valiantly resisted AIM/YIM over the years, and I applaud you. By the end of the week, I'm going to uninstall these two monstrosities, install a Jabber client and begin utilizing LJ Talk. I'm going to play around with Trillian as well as the integrated Gizmo/LJ Talk client and see which I prefer. Considering I'm a LiveJournal citizen, one which's integrated with my blogging community seems to make sense, but we'll see. Not that I've ever been a big chat person, in fact the only time I even open any of the chat clients now is for chatting with Welf, and I can always talk to her on the phone if for some reason she's uninterested in using an open-standard IM client instead-of/in-addition-to AIM. Furthermore, I'm going to check out Thunderbird, Mozilla's e-mail client. If I can migrate my archived Outlook e-mail to it and like it, Outlook/MSIM is gone, too. I'm just tired of the whole lot of them.

See you on LJ Talk!
Tags: livejournal, opinion
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