Mac OS X Leopard: The Missing Manual

Three Chat Networks

iChat lets you reach out to chat partners on three different networks:

• The AIM network. If you've signed up for a .Mac address (the paid kind or the free kind described below) or a free AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) account, you can chat with anyone in the 150-million-member AOL Instant Messenger network.

• The Jabber network. Jabber is another chat network, whose key virtue is itsopen-source origins. In other words, it wasn't masterminded by some corporate media behemoth; it's an all-volunteer effort, joined by thousands of programmers all over the world. There's no one Jabber chat program (like AOL Instant Messenger). There are dozens, available for Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, Unix, Palm and PocketPC organizers, and so on. All of them can chat with each other across the Internet in one glorious frenzy of typing.

  And now there's one more program that can join the party: iChat.

• Google Talk. Evidently, Google felt that there just weren't enough different chat programs, because it released its own chat program in 2005.

  Behind the scenes, it uses the Jabber network, so Google Talk doesn't really count as a different network. (Hence the headline.) But it does mean that you can use iChat to converse with all those Google Talkers, too.

• Your own local network. Thanks to the Bonjour network-recognition technology (which Apple called Rendezvous before the Attack of the Trademark Lawyers), you can communicate with other Macs on your own office network without signing up for anything ...