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!
