Other downsides of proprietary centralized services are that the network could be entirely unreachable (heck, the company could go out of business) or that they could restrict access to alternative clients at any time (which has happened a few times already).Īs long as you use IM as a toy, this might all not matter to you. Every additional Jabber service increases the compatible userbase, while every additional proprietary IM service leads to more fragmentation. Only Jabber makes it possible for Google to offer an IM service that countless users can directly communicate with. Could Google offer their own ICQ service? Obviously not, instead they would have to create their own self-contained competing service which would once again not be able to talk to clients of another service. Imagine one company would control all email, that sounds quite ludicrous, doesn’t it? Everyone can implement improved servers or clients, as long as they follow the protocol. The advantages of the de-centralized approach are that you are independent of a single company. This is not a matter of opinion, but a technical fact. We don’t all use the “AOL Email Server”, instead we might use our provider’s email server, which then forwards the messages to the recepient’s email server, and so on.

This is the same way our email services work. Every server can send to every other server. There is no single Jabber server which controls the entire network. ICQ only runs on one server (well, a bunch most probably), while Jabber is designed to work between multiple servers. Oh, and I don’t ICQ & MSN being isolated and centralized services as atleast everything can be found in one placeĪnyway, they _are_ centralized, no matter what you think.

A good icq and jabber