LiveJournal have announced that they are now running an XMPP server, with users’ rosters auto-populated with their LJ friends.

Jean-Louis Seguineau wonders why there hasn’t been much coverage of this outside of the initial announcement on LiveJournal. I think you have to remember that this is the release of a service rather than a product, and only pre-announcement at that. Had SixApart officially launched a branded Jabber client that everyone could download and get going with, I think we’d have seen a lot more coverage. As it is, you need to know what Jabber is, know how to get a client, configure it and then connect. Then you’ll have to run it alongside all your proprietary messengers (unless you use a native plugin-based client like GAIM or Miranda).

We may still see that large announcement, alongside full instructions on how to get going on any platform and bots for posting to your LJ, but I imagine that the initial adoption rate will be slow.

Still, what this really means is another ten million or so potential Jabber users and a lot more exposure for the technology as a whole, which can only be a good thing. It’ll be interesting to see if SA take this further and integrate it with any of their other business services like Movable Type, TypePad and Vox.