As your social network grows, it becomes likely that your contacts will be using different instant messaging networks. You can decide to push them to use the same network as you and force them to configure yet another software application, you can start using their network and annoy yourself with yet another software application, or you can just drop all the clutter and use Jabber instead.

Once you are connected to Jabber, you can chat with buddies from many other networks.

To do this, just find a “transport gateway” in your Jabber neighborhood and register to it; that will make it appear in your contact list. Once your transport gateway is alive, it will fetch automatically your contact list from the foreign network and add it to your Jabber contact list. Of course, you can also manage your foreign contacts in Jabber afterwards.

There are two transports available for the Jabber service at Vodka-Pomme.net :

• msn.vodka-pomme.net to access the MSN network;
• icq.vodka-pomme.net to access the ICQ and AIM networks.

Feel free to use them.