andrew carter

OK, this is a convoluted way to do multi-IM. But it seems to work well. Hopefully, it is a glimpse into a future where all IM systems talk to each other.

Windows has one app that is superior to anything else on OS X - Trillian. I’ve tried to use Adium but just can’t give it any love. It’s lack of support for audio and video makes it always feel like GAIM on Linux. Not good. iChat has problems as well (but will be getting better in Leopard) but it supports iSight. It is also integrated into the system better (like in Mail). I would rather use iChat.

After searching around the internet, I’ve come up with the following recipe. Here is how you can get iChat to host AIM, MSN, Yahoo, Google, and just about anything else (explanation is below to understand what is going on):

• Sign up for Google Talk.
• Download Psi jabber client.
• Launch Psi
• Enter Google Talk for the name and click Add
• Enter your Google Talk id for Jabber ID and your password (ex. myname@gmail.com)
• Click Connection
• Enable SSL, Ignore SSL Warnings, Plaintext passwords, and Keep-alive
• Set server host to talk.google.com and port 5223
• Click save
• Login to Google Talk’s jabber server by selecting Google Talk and selecting Status -> Online
• Select Psi -> Preferences and select Events
• Check Ignore Events from contacts not in roster and Auto-authorize contacts
• Deselect Notify when auth received and then click OK
• Select General -> Service Discovery
• Enter jabber.anywise.com in address and click browse
• Select MSN or Yahoo gateway
• Right click and select Register
• Enter your MSN or Yahoo credentials
• You will see all your other contacts get added to your buddy list
• Quit Psi
• Launch iChat
• Choose iChat -> Preferences and select Accounts pane
• Click (+) to add a new account
• Select Account Type of Jabber
• Enter your Google Talk ID and password (ex. yourname@gmail.com)
• Enter talk.google.com for server and Add
• Click Server Settings for Google Talk account
• Enable SSL and allow self-signed certificates. Also verify port 5223 is used
• Close preferences
• Choose Window -> Jabber
• Set status to Online and you will see your full buddy list
• IM your friends

What did you just do? A lot went into this but it is actually not that complicated. Jabber is an open-source IM protocol. There are many Jabber servers around the world that you can use to talk to other Jabber users. Jabber has a lightweight registration concept. It supports federation of other Jabber servers. So you can get an ID on a federated Jabber server and use that to login to another. Google Talk uses Jabber and they are part of the federated network.

The second part is that many Jabber servers run gateways to other IM systems including AIM, MSN, and Yahoo. Logging into the server, you can register the gateway service and use it to bridge to other systems transparently. Gateways are not hosted by every Jabber server. You need to find one that does to use it.

iChat can talk to Jabber servers. Since it can, you can use gateways. Google Talk doesn’t run a gateway. So you need to use another Jabber server.

There are many other ways to do this. I picked Google Talk because it is a nice way of getting an ID and many people already have one. I picked jabber.anywise.com because it has the gateways I wanted. The jabber.anywise.com server will auth Google Talk ID’s and you can then register to use the gateway. Replace your Jabber account with any other you like and use any other gateway server you like

There are a few other pieces of information that are useful as well:

• Your contacts are wrapped in a different form for the gateway. The format is user%service.com@gateway.jabber.anywise.com. For example, billgates%microsoft.com@msn.jabber.anywise.com.
• You can hide the messy Jabber IM address in OS X. For any user in iChat, get info on the user and associate an Address Book card to them. Their name will appear in iChat instead of the gateway address.
• The contacts will show up anywhere you use your Google Talk id.
• Deleting the contacts from Google Talk does not delete them from the actual service just the gateway