[chapter-delegates] Re: Reminder: Tsunami Alert Network : more necessary than ever

[Baker Fred]

On Mar 28, 2005, at 9:07 PM, Franck Martin wrote:
> While Yahoo messenger is a good piece of propietary software, 
> shouldn't we use something that follows an RFC?

I personally run Jabber (fred at ecotroph.net), AIM (FBakerSBA), Lotus 
Sametime within Cisco, and now Yahoo (FredBakerSBA). I'm running on 
MacOSX 10.3.8; the current Adiumx beta runs all of those and is running 
fine. Nitro runs jabber very well, and the other tools I have tried are 
not worth the effort IMHO. On Windows, I ran Exodus for jabber and 
Cisco's sametime client for AIM and Sametime.

I don't think the argument for selecting one over another is the 
proprietary or non-proprietary nature of the code. The argument that 
moves me is the scalability and robustness of the data and control 
paths. AIM and Yahoo are public services, and Sametime is an enterprise 
service, that depend on a central server (probably a server farm). Take 
out the server (farm), the route to it, or the bandwidth to it, and all 
IM throughout the world using that service dies. Jabber has servers, 
but everyone can mount their own if they like - it is far more 
distributed and therefore more robust.

But for today, let's use the service that Andreu suggested. Next time 
we can use a different one if one likes.