The missing brick for Jabber is there. Its name is Google Talk and it is the bulldozer that will push to a wider adoption of Jabber and XMPP. I'm not the only one to think so. And it is a big step towards making IM an open thing.

I already mentionned that Apple added Jabber support to iChat, and it works with google. Gaim, the most popular client in the open source world works fine too. Look at the list of clients.

And the privacy issues that I mentionned about several proprietary IM services seems to not apply to Google Talk, given their Term Of Service.

But what did Google do wrong ? The client is not Open Source, but since it is not a requirement and since it runs only on Windows, I don't consider that as an issue. It currently does not work with other Jabber service. But I think that Google might fix that in the future. It currently does not interact with other IM service, but Google said the intention to do so, if they are let do. They already plan to do that for the VoIP thing.

More info (fr)