Six Apart, the world leader in blogging software and services, announced it has created an open source modular, scalable, high performance Jabber server that enables others to integrate their services with Jabber and LJ Talk, LiveJournal's new instant messaging and voice service. The new server provides smoothly integrated IM and voice capabilities, and is now available for any company or service provider to use for free.

In addition, Six Apart announced two major enhancements to its popular LiveJournal social network, enabling the ten million members of the LiveJournal community to IM and talk to friends both inside and outside of the LiveJournal service. The enhancements are LJ Talk, LiveJournal's new instant messaging and voice service, and Gizmo Project for LJ Talk, a preferred voice/IM client optimized for use with LJ Talk.

The introduction of the Jabber server continues LiveJournal's tradition of contributing significant technologies to the open source community. For example, Perlbal, a load-balancing platform used by sites like Wikipedia, and memcached, a powerful memory caching system for databases used by sites like Facebook and Craigslist, are just some of LiveJournal's innovations that have made the delivery of web-based services more robust and efficient.

"LiveJournal has always been open source because we are passionate about keeping it a platform for innovation," said Barak Berkowitz, Six Apart's CEO. "We want to make it easy for people to build services on top of the LiveJournal platform. And we want to make it easy for other services to connect to our open platform. Today's announcements are good examples of the kind of openness, inclusion and innovation to which we are committed."

Since LJ Talk is based on the open Jabber standard, LiveJournal users can IM and talk with friends who are using other Jabber-based services such as Google's Gtalk or Earthlink's Mindspring. LJ Talk works with any Jabber client, including Gaim, Adium, iChat, Trillian Pro, and Pandion. Jabber is best known as "the Linux of instant messaging" -- an open, secure alternative to proprietary IM services. Under the hood, Jabber is a set of streaming XML protocols and technologies that enable any two entities on the Internet to exchange messages, presence, and other structured information in real time.

Through a partnership with Gizmo Project, LiveJournal will offer a preferred voice and IM software client called Gizmo Project for LJ Talk which will automatically synchronize a user's LJ friends with their Gizmo Project for LJ Talk contact list. Besides instant messaging, the software will enable LJ users to use the Internet to call other computers, landlines and mobile phones (also known as VOIP). LJ users at the Plus and Paid level will easily be able to make voice posts to LiveJournal via VOIP. The software is expected to be available in August 2006.

"These enhancements enrich the LiveJournal community by letting users easily communicate with people who are both inside and outside it, breaking down barriers and facilitating free-flowing communication across the globe," said Artur Bergman, LiveJournal engineering manager. "We are joining forces with other players in the open source community to create an open network with no lock-in, and one that is fun and exciting for our users."

Any company or service provider wishing to use the LJ Jabber server can go to http://code.sixapart.com for more information.