Jabber is an open instant messaging technology that anyone can use. The Jabber community runs a worldwide network of free IM services and has created plenty of free software that users can download --... More

Jabber is an open instant messaging technology that anyone can use. The Jabber community runs a worldwide network of free IM services and has created plenty of free software that users can download -- clients for every device and operating system, servers you can run at various organization, and libraries you can use to build Jabber applications. It works directly over the Internet, has distributed servers, utilizes an XML-based protocol - XMPP - , and has transparent compatibility with other IM systems (ICQ, AIM, Yahoo, MSN, IRC, SMTP, etc). Unlike most instant messaging protocols, XMPP is an open standard. Like e-mail, it is an open system where anyone who has a domain name and a suitable Internet connection can run their own Jabber server and talk to users on other servers. The standard server implementations and many clients are also free and open source software.  [edit]  Less