” Today we’re taking another step, with the public availability of access to the Messenger network via XMPP, an open standard. This means that anyone can build innovative messaging clients—either stand-alone or built into their devices—that include access to Messenger’s 300 million active users.”
Anyone can build a Messenger client—with open standards access via XMPP
Years later, Microsoft finally joins the standard protocol that everyone uses, allowing us users to finally use ichat to talk in the MSN network and probably improving the reversed engineered library that Adium and others use.
However, in typical Microsoft fashion, while they appear to join a standard they do it in a non-standard way… And now the login parts appears to use some OAuth magic (of which i’m not qualified to talk about) instead of the standard protocols than everyone else already uses.
So, no need to go running to your ichat program, Apple still needs to update it for using the standard protocol XMPP with MSN (which iChat already supports…)
Ah Microsoft. Somedays i have true faith in you. And then you go and just spoil it all again…