So my latest geek craze, is I'm researching online chat systems. IRC, Jabber, such things. Writing some code, reading documents, etc. etc.

One of the things most exciting things I've come across is Psyced.

From what I've read so far, it's an open-source multiuser chat system done right, learning from IRC's strengths and weaknesses and avoiding Jabber's buzzword compliant XML-suckage.

They've removed the single-points of failure from IRC and decentralized the system, much like Jabber did, but they've kept the protocol light-weight and simple, treated multi-user chat as a core feature (not an afterthought like MSN and Jabber and all the other "IM" systems) and most importantly, they've maintained backwards compatibility with existing clients - you can connect to the PSYC network using either a Jabber client or an IRC client and the PSYC network can talk to the Jabber world and some IRC networks as well.

It's not all roses though.

Whoever did the web-sites for the project should really be in some other line of work. The pages are very disorganized and so ugly they're almost painful to read. Sadly, I doubt they'll succeed in taking over the online chat world unless they invest some serious time and effort into cleaning up their presentation.

Also the fact that their proof-of-concept server is written in LPC, a programming language primarily used for old MUD (multi-user dungeon) games, may put some people off.

I'm going to have a go at installing it though, to see how it performs. If it works well, and I can figure out a way to migrate users from jabberd 1.4.x to psyced, I may one of these days end up "upgrading" jabber.klaki.net so it speaks PSYC.