In his latest post today, Robert Peake asks the question, "Has anyone proposed a Net_Jabber package lately?"

I was just talking to Jacques Marneweck and was again reminded of my dormant idea to write a Net_Jabber packge for Pear. With Google Talk basically being Jabber and raising the public interest yet again in instant messaging, it might be useful to make this available in Pear.

And with PHP 5.1 you should be able to switch the stream context to TLS on-the-fly to handle Jabber's TLS authentication (haven't tested this yet, though...) In PHP4 you could use a digest or some other semi-secure mode to authenticate your "client" with the Jabber server.

There are definitely some possibilities behind this idea, and, as he mentions, with Google Talk around, the Jabber-connected audience is even greater than ever before.

What kind of things could you see this technology being used for?