With all the colours and emoticons that most chat software comes with nowadays, I long, quite often, for the simplicity of text. The strength of ideas coming from text, not pictures and sounds and photo-sharing and let’s-play-together gizmos. No. Just text.

This is probably why I’m so drawn to Jabber and IRC. Sure, you can slap video over XMPP if you want, sound too¹, but the basics revolve around text and interoperability. No need to be stuck on one server with just one provider - take your ID and leave, if you want. Talk to people on GTalk, soon enough people on AIM - freedom, as it were. And no useless graphics and themes and crap - beautiful interfaces highlight the content, they don’t try to dress it up and hide its imperfections.

IRC has been around for so long because there are still a lot of people that don’t care for more than just text. And it is precisely because I’m one to say that form is function² that I praise text so much. Sometimes I think even this blog’s theme is too busy - maybe I’ll look into it.

I think Petter is with me on this one.

1. ooVoo does this; my review will be coming in soon [↩]
2. Not in the ‘equals’ sense, but rather to mean I think they should not be thought of separately in most contexts [↩]