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Jabber is the only mainstream free (as in speech) instant messaging protocol. Unfortunately, most Jabber clients for GNU/Linux only provide options for messaging and group chats, overlooking the audio chatting portion of Jabber (powered by the Google-funded libjingle). Enter Jabbin, the free Qt-based Jabber VoIP client.
"...Though there are a number of IM options for Emacs, one that works particularly well with minimal fuss is Jabber.el, a robust and configurable Jabber client that supports basic Jabber/XMPP and multi-user chat. You can download it from the project's Sourceforge page ..."
Although its name sounds like that of a bacterium, Coccinella is a nice cross-platform open source Jabber client. While Jabber, and IM clients in general, are a dime a dozen, Coccinella sports a few nifty features that make it worth considering if your are in the market for a Jabber client.
"I like to run my own jabber server, so that I can be contacted as tom@jerakeen.org. Also, I’m a sucker for punishment. I’ve run serveral different Jabber servers over the last year or so, and yesterday I started toying with ejabberd. It was probably the easiest to set up of any of the servers I’ve tried, and I recommend it..."
A few weeks ago FSF have reported that Google had started blocking invites sent from non-Google Jabber servers. This was done as a crude anti-spam measure. Google have since rolled out proper anti-spam filtering for its Jabber service, and has removed the invite block. This was announced a few days ago in a public mailing list post.
Psi is a free, open source instant messaging application designed for the Jabber IM network (including Google Talk) compatible with Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.
If you're tired with the Jabber functionality of Empathy or Pidgin, both lacking lots of important features for this protocol, you should give Psi a try.
If you spend most of your computing life in Firefox, it makes sense to consolidate other online activities in your browser. There are extensions that can help you to do just that: you can manage your bookmarks with the del.icio.us extension, chat on IRC channels using Chatzilla, and read RSS feeds in Sage.
