Instabird Archive

Update: It appears there are two sites, a .com and a .org – the .org talks about compiling. Since my post, I see the site admin added a huge message about going to the .com site to download compiled versions for Win/Mac/Linux. Great to see this correction so others don’t make the same mistake I did.

News out of Mashable-land is the pre-alpha 0.1 release of a new IM aggregator client named Instantbird. It ties into the XUL language which is compatible with Firefox and Thunderbird for easy extension creation. You have to compile this application after the download which makes it super-sexy to those early adopters. Wouldn’t it make sense to offer a pre-compiled Win/Mac version? Instantbird currently connects with the following networks:

• AIM
• Bonjour
• Gadu-Gadu
• Google Talk
• Groupwise
• ICQ
• MSN
• QQ
• SILC
• SIMPLE
• Sametime
• XMPP
• Yahoo!

It seems similar to desktop client Trillian and Web IM clients Meebo and eBuddy. I can only imagine that the real power will come from the library of extensions.

And something to ponder: Since we know that none of these IM aggregators can access Skype, what about if Skype was to allow access to other networks inside their client. That might be a revenue-generation idea as well!