i have a personal philosophy: Use things that make your life easier.
Of course "easier" is a fairly relative term, but it's stuff that i prefer to use that doesn't overly complicate matters. For quite some time, that included using Yahoo Instant Messanger (Y!IM) as my messenger client of choice. Sadly, those days have come to an end.
For various reasons, i can't run the default Yahoo Messenger Client, nor do i want to dedicate a web page or flash app in order to do messaging. What's more, i don't want to see a bunch of ads or have cute smiley faces appear in code snippets. For the past two years, i've been using Pidgin as my client since it's far smaller and talks with all the messaging services. (Well, almost all. Facebook is still closed. Whaddya Know…)
Pidgin makes my life easier, so it's a good tool to have. What's more, it encouraged me to dig up a lot of my older messenger accounts because i could finally run one program that let me talk to anyone on any other network.
Up until a few days ago when Yahoo decided to be dorks.
They changed the method they use to authorize connections. Mind you, they do that from time to time to prune back spammers and others with malicious intent. It's a fair enough cause since their stand is "It's our network, so we control what goes on it". i can't argue with that, but it does tell me something else. It's their network, not mine, so i use it at their discretion, not mine.
So, much like my decision about getting a Facebook vanity URL, i decided to switch things around.
XMPP (or Jabber) is an open protocol that's been out for a few years. There are dozens of free (both in cost and in not ad driven) clients that can use it. What's more, i can add a Jabber server to my domain and publish my client connect without worrying about being spammed to death.
So here it is: jabber@jrconlin.com It's not an email address, and before you can send your offers of s3xy weeb camz, i have to agree to get messages from you.
That's going to be my new main IM address. It's mine, lives under my control, allows me to log in and run on multiple machines, and i don't have to worry about it not working in the future because someone wasn't making enough money.
Something Yahoo has been in the habit of doing quite a bit lately.
