I am big on instant messaging. I wasn’t always. I really enjoyed ICQ until AOL bought them. lucifex likes to bring up how low his ICQ number was. Mine was 6 digits. Anyhow, after ICQ I just couldn’t bring myself to jump in with MSN, Yahoo!, or AOL. Besides, they seemed like they were more interested in expanding their e-mail services than creating a compatible and stable messaging platform (and I don’t blame them, they are businesses after all).
Then along came Jabber, or rather, XMPP. That changed the game for me, and I really like messaging again. I am a big softy for decentralized services that I can easily run on my own servers.
I wanted to be able to publish my jabber address online without getting spam, so I created a sub-domain specifically for messaging. For a client I use Psi. I primarily use Mac OS X, and it seems to have the smallest footprint, both graphically and processing-wise. However, I have only used a few others, like Fire and Adium.
Anyone have any suggestions for an active open source jabber client?
Also, I like the Speech Bubbles iconset for Psi.