Up North

Heading out to Guadec tomorrow, really looking forward to it this year but saying good bye to Emma and Carina felt hard after a nice week of vacation together.All of the Imendio crew will be there and Martyn has set us up with three flats at the Comfort Zone. There seems to be several interesting talks this year and I hope there will be a lot of discussions around the future of GTK+.Of the Imendians Carlos will be doing a lightning talk about Giggle, Kris will be giving a talk about the current state of GTK+. Finally Sven will be showing off some best practices when developing with GTK+/GNOME. Be sure to go listen to them, they are bound to be interesting.Send me an email or locate me on sight if you want to meet up for a coffee or a beer.See you all there!

Put up the presentations from our sessions at Guadec 2006 so if anyone wants the PDF version of any of Imendios sessions just visit:

http://www.imendio.com/guadec2006

Thanks to every one for making this the best Guadec ever!

Like I guess no one missed Google released GTalk earlier this year. This caused quite a lot of noise, especially in the Jabber/XMPP community since they selected XMPP as protocol for this. It also lets you connect to GTalk with any available Jabber client, Jabber clients exists on a diversity of platforms.

One big obstacle for Jabber/XMPP is that it’s userbase consists of a minority of IM users compared to the other networks, like AIM. Yesterday it was announced that Google buys 5% of AOL (who are responsible for AIM) and that they will integrate their IM systems.

For a project such as GNOME, going with XMPP is the only viable option in my opinion. A project that claims to support and chose free and open standards shouldn’t block a pure Jabber/XMPP client to be the IM-client of choice. A few years back when discussions about including Gossip in GNOME, the main argument against it was that it didn’t support AIM (and to some extent MSN and ICQ).

If Google can choose XMPP for IM, shouldn’t GNOME be able to?