Big news in France : the radio Skyrock released SkyMessenger (nicknamed SM), a Jabber-based instant messaging service. Some facts :
- Skyrock is famous in France for Skyblog, its very successful blog service, with more than 3.4 millions active blogs. If only a few Skyblog users start using SkyMessenger, it still means a lot of new Jabber users.
- The service seems to be pure-Jabber. Not a modified, incompatible version as in Livecom. People managed to connect using Gajim.
- The client is heavily based on Gajim and released under the GPL.
- The service is only a Beta for now, with a limited number of downloads.
- The address used by the server is skymess.com. Only port 5222 is open, with SASL enabled.
- It seems that the business plan is to provide information through the IM service, about updated skyblogs for examples.
- Server-to-server (s2s) communications are currently disabled. Some well-informed geeks seem to think that they plan to open it. It is confirmed by the add contact dialog, with proposes to add contact of type icq, msn, wanadoo, etc …