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Are the seemingly never-ending Instant-Messaging wars finally coming to a close?

Jabber/XMPP has gotten another big shot in the arm this week, with the announcement that Livejournal has launched a Jabber server for its users, complete with the friends-list pre-loaded as the Jabber roster. They will be incorporating s2s communication, along with lots of other features.

This comes on the heels of Google Talk, which last year launched its XMPP-based Google Talk service, opened it to XMPP s2s on the Internet. They also incorporated an (optional) user-friendly AJAX-based IM client into the gmail web client — look for Livejournal to do the same, as well as integrating the blogging/comment-notification functions into instant messaging as well.

With two big players like Livejournal and Google backing the open XMPP standard, things are looking more grim than ever for proprietary, closed, and centralized instant messaging services like AOL, Yahoo, et al. Here’s hoping the trend continues!