According to Voxilla the next version of the Pulver Communicator will be compliant with Skype. It’s good in that there is another multi-network client out there to join the growing number of them, not unlike Gaim and Trillian.
I wonder if the likes of AOL, MSN and Yahoo! will ever stop blocking these rogue IM clients. I guess we will continue to see the service providers battle these free clients that hack their way into these networks until they decide to just go open standards themselves rendering these multi-network clients useless. Maybe they already have and we just don’t know it yet.
Just think if Yahoo! and AOL joined forces in the IM world and used open standards protocols like SIP and MSRP for this new client, they would immediately have approximately 80 Million users at their disposal. The open standards approach would allow anyone who wrote a client application to communicate with those 80 million people + other developers who are abiding by those open standards when building their apps. That number could grow immediately into the hundres of millions of users.
I would think that once the first big service providers takes the plunge you will see them all follow, which means that unless makers of these hacked multi-network clients want to be left in the dust, they will need to incorporate open standards technology.
When will this happen? Could even happen this year in fact. When it does, Xten will be here to welcome them with open arms, we have enough SDKs to go around for everyone 🙂