The last few months have seen me becoming more and more evangelical when it comes to the wonderfulness that is Jabber. I’ve been running jabberd 2 on Hedwig for at least a year now, probably longer (although it looks like I am currently three revisions behind the most recent release…).
I’ve been using jabber slightly longer than that because when complimented by a good client like Psi, I am able not only to secure my communication with the server but with the help of GnuPG, I am able to encrypt conversations with actual people. I pretty much always encrypt conversations with Peter and have used it in the past to securely transfer bank information and stuff.
Peter showed me a releveant post from Drunken Batman’s Blog a little while ago while we were discussing our project for the PyWeek competition that we’ve foolishly engaged ourselves in 
The blog pretty much confirms everything I’ve been expecting over the last little bit. The commercial IM providers are looking to kill access to their services by old and third-party clients. They don’t like Google. Google is going to do nice things for Jabber, etc…
OSX isn’t doing bad by Jabber either. Their server release ships with ‘iChat Server’ which is an Applefied front-end for administration of a pretty stock jabberd 1.4 server. By default, all users on the server have jabber accounts. The only tweak I had to do on Alumni was to uncomment server to server functionality. (There is no gui for it, so I had to manually edit the xml config file) Without having done this, the server would have been only useful for internal communication. It is now possible for users to IM me on my personal account in stead of forcing me to log in to the mac.
Upon having fixed this feature, I sent out a huge email to all of our users. I am giving them the promise that if they take the trouble to start using Jabber, they’ll be able to get better response times out of me for their service requests 
I’ve also mentioned Jabber to Sarah again today. We’ll prolly be setting her up with it as well so she doesn’t have to deal with certain elements of ICQ yuckiness – such as getting through pesky firewalls at work 
Last night, I wound up getting to set up Kyle and Stori’s computer for the service as well – Dad popped up out of the blue and Dallin and I hed him get things going on the box they’ll be hauling out to her this weekend.
I’ve made sure that Penny’s using her account again on both machines she logs in to and we’ll probably be sneaking it on to her mother’s machine when we’re down babysitting Dallin