A few days ago I was annoyed at Yahoo’s breaking of third-party instant messaging clients. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they didn’t stay broken for long—A little more than a day passed between the blog post I saw announcing the problem and another indicating that it had been fixed in the Gaim libraries (and only about four hours after that for an update to Adium, my current client of choice.

Anyway, today reading TidBITS, I saw an interesting note:

**Tiger Server** — One more thing… As with previous Mac OS X
releases, Apple also has a server version. Along with the
improvements in Tiger, Tiger Server will include …
an iChat server for protecting the
privacy of internal communications (it will be compatible with
open source Jabber clients for various operating systems)….

If Apple’s iChat server will be Jabber-compatible, then does that mean that iChat will act as a Jabber client? If so, perhaps that would speed adoption of Jabber among mainstream users. It might also mainstream the idea that one IM client should be able to work on multiple networks, which would be nice.