Voipally

Arstechnica has an editorial on some suggestions for how Google’s GTalk Instant Messenger client could impove. They suggest:

• Focusing on corporate users, by integrating support for things like Google Calendar.
• Increasing mobile support – they note that GTalk on the Nintendo DS would have huge potential.
• Soliciting feature requests from their users.

See http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060731-7385.html for the whole article.

One of the cool things about Jabber is that it allows you to host your own server, which gives you an IM address like name@host.com.
The webhosting company Dreamhost has taken advantage of this and now offers to host your own Jabber server in any of their hosting plans. I haven’t tried the Jabber hosting, but it seems like a pretty good deal – plans start at $7.95 per month for unlimited domain name hosting, SSH, etc as well as your own Jabber server.

UPDATE: During April, the code 30OFFER will get you a $30 discount on any plan from Dreamhost. Just enter it as a promo code during the sign-up process and the discount will be applied.