Hmm. I missed that one, but two weeks ago the Jabber instant messaging protocol has become an official IETF standard known under the name XMPP.

It is an easy prediction to foresee that XMPP is going to be the upcoming Internet standard in instant messaging and other real-time data delivery protocols. I think the XML-based protocol can serve text and rich media chats, real-time key signing and exchange for personal encryption and many many other applications.

The only door-stopper so far is the lack of enough stable implementations – the client situation on the Mac is a very drastic example. There is barely nothing really usuable available. Yes, I know, there is Fire and a bunch of other Jabber-only clients but if you worked with iChat you will never go back to their prehistoric user interfaces. Eventually this will change soon as iChat already uses the Jabber protocol when doing Rendezvous chatting.