There are only 9 days left, until Open Discussion Day, and I am posting this to remind you of the event and the purpose. Open Discussion Day is May 19th, every year, and it's a day where you drop your legacy IM protocols in favor of open protocols, such as Jabber/XMMP.
I blogged about this last year as well, and since then, I have only been using Jabber. I haven't looked back. I had some family and friends on MSN and a few on ICQ, Yahoo! and AIM, so making the change wasn't easy. In fact, it took a great deal of discussion with my wife and family members. When it came down to it, I had to do what was important for me, and being a Free Software advocate, I needed to drop proprietary protocols, and use only Jabber. It's been one of the best decisions that I have made in my life.
So, for those reading, I encourage you to do the same. Ditch MSN, AIM, ICQ, Yahoo! and others, and go completely Free with a Jabber account. You'll be glad you did, and if your family and friends want to IM you, they can just register a Jabber account, or use their Gmail, to get in touch with you. If you are a Free Software advocate, then I submit that using those legacy proprietary protocols is a bit hypocritical, don't you think? 🙂
Not only should you switch to Jabber as your IM, but Ogg Vorbis for your music, Ogg Theora for your video, OpenDocument Format for your documents, Jingle for VOIP, etc. The underlying goal is to use open formats and protocols to the inferior proprietary alternatives.
Take a stop by the Open Discussion Day wiki as well. May serve to be useful and informative.
P.S.- I changed my personal Jabber server from Wildfire to ejabberd recently, and as such, lost a lot of my contacts. Fortunately, I had a backup of my roster. Unfortunately, the majority are Gmail users. Due to the way Gmail handles it's invite system, I cannot re-request an authorization to add you to my roster. You need to delete me from your roster, and re-add me. It sucks, but don't blame me, blame Gmail. So, either get a better Jabber account, or, if you want to IM me, and you're using Gmail, you'll need to remove my contact from your list, and re-add it.
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