Joi Ito has been working on a tool that blurs a number of boundaries between various social software tools. His TechnoBot is a python script that grabs his Technorati cosmos every ten minutes, and then adds new links to his blog, as well as notifying him via email, Jabber, ad IRC. This got me thinking about Jabber. I consider myself to be a reasonably technical person--an early adopter of many technologies, and an enthusiastic user of most of the social software tools I've happened across in the past fifteen years. But I still find Jabber baffling. I understand iChat. I understand Rendezvous, and AOL, and ICQ (I even have a five-digit ICQ number). But every time I've tried to find and use a Jabber tool, I've ended up frustrated. (Is there a _Jabber for Dummies_ site out there anywhere that faithful readers can point me to?) The problem, I think, lies with the centralized vs decentralized approach to tools. On the one hand, centralized tools tend to be easy to use. It's clear where you register for them (AOL IM, for example), and the interfaces are consistent. On the other hand, centralized systems have built-in flaws--users are often hostage to the designers' view of the system, for example (Friendster and LinkedIn are good examples), and scaling results in eerily predictable problems (like the Fotolog controversy that Clay wrote about recently). I'll be attending the Supernova conference in DC next month, and it looks as though some of these tensions will be discussed. In the area of social software the tension is already evident, and it will be even more important as we move towards things like digital identities.