Apparently, this is old news to everyone but me: LiveJournal has launched LJtalk, their new Jabber instant messaging service.

I've been a bit nervous that Google's Gtalk might someday leverage their huge userbase to help them drive the XMPP standard, wresting control from the community at large. This move by LiveJournal indicates that the 'net may finally be moving toward real distributed instant messaging, and that I probably shouldn't worry so much.

When I read that the LiveJournal crew had written their own jabber framework, I was a little excited, until I got far enough to see that Djabberd is "implemented in Perl (which might dissuade you)". Might? Sane people do NOT write something like a jabber daemon in an interpreted language. It's just plain lazy. At least they're using the C libxml for xml processing. That'll save a good deal of overhead compared to going all Perl.

Why isn't there an awesome jabberd written completely in C or something similarly sane, well-known, and openly available? Djabberd is Perl with a little C. Wildfire is Java. Ejabberd is erlang (which may be a fine language, but I don't happen to keep erlang coders in my pocket or know the language myself... heck, I don't even know if it's interpreted or compiled). jabberd just plain lacks important features, like the ability to cluster or handle multiple vhosts in a convenient, reliable way. I'm glad to see that Jabber is growing in popularity. Perhaps this is the beginning of the end for instant messenger lock-in. The growth of Jabber makes me think there might still be a little hope left that the internet won't be completely taken over by the Borg-like forces of corporate America.