crafterm's weblog

iChat and MSN?

Instant Messaging is one of those interesting services that's proliferated with multiple protocols, features and vendors over the past couple of years. While some services have merged or offered compatibility (eg. AIM/ICQ, etc), most of them are largely incompatible.

On the Mac, iChat is the default pre-installed chat client, which supports AIM/.Mac and Jabber accounts. The unfortunate thing is that iChat doesn't natively support MSN - which if you're like me, blocks out a whole bunch of people, etc, that use only this type of IM client.

The problem with iChat is even worse though, because if you have an iSight or want to use iChat's Mac->Mac SIP VoIP client, you must use iChat. So usually this leads to us running multiple chat clients at the same time with different accounts (and then Skype on top of this), or abandoning iChat (and those features) completely in favour of something like Adium - both solutions aren't optimal, and generally speaking also a waste of resources.

The situation has changed though in OS X Tiger which now supports Jabber. Jabber servers (if so configured) allow connectivity to other IM services such as MSN (yippi!), so if your Jabber server supports it, it's possible to import your MSN/etc contacts into Jabber and communicate with them via iChat as if they were normal iChat citizens.

For example, take a look at the Australian Jabber server's iChat site. Under the section "Gateways and Transports" they mention support for other protocols. Using this form, you can submit your Jabber account details, and your MSN account details and import your MSN contacts into Jabber. For simple end to end IM it seems to work fine.

The only caveat is that iChat only lets you connect to one Jabber server at a time (why I'm not sure?), so if you're using Google Talk, unfortunately you have to decide between Jabber or GTalk, as again unfortunately, Google Talk is currently an island. The Google Talk website does mention that they're working on opening connectivity so hopefully this changes in the near future.