The latest version of iChat has added support for Jabber, and it already supports rendezvous (now called bonjour, which is the worst name I’ve heard for a very long time) and AIM.

iChat also supports non-standard, proprietary audio and video chat with other iChat users.

I like iChat, its got a clean and simple interface, and generally seems to work very well. But I live in the real world, which means that not all of my friends own a mac, and not all of the Windoze users use AIM.

There are already plenty of open source multi-protocol clients out there (Fire is the best Mac one I’ve found so far), but I don’t want to give up the iChat interface, or the audio and video conferencing (I’ve got an iSight and I’m damn well going to use it).

It seems to me that if the developers of iChat have half a brain-cell between them, then they will have implemented some sort of plug in mechanism for supporting different chat protocols, just for their own sanity.

I’d really like to see this mechanism being made public, so that third parties can implement plugins to support some of the other popular protocols. And if it doesn’t exist yet, then it really ought to… so get cracking please Apple.