Chat w/o Yahoo and MSN
 

I was wondering if there was a way to chat without Yahoo
messenger or MSN messenger.
Given an IP address, should it be that difficult to set up our own
chat client/server?

Has anyone done it without using yahoo or msn so far? If yes,
How successfull have you been?. I know our ISPs give different
IP addresses each time, but has it been such a problem?

Both Yahoo and MSN are good, but hate to rely on either of them.

You could always setup your own IRC server and chat that way.. ??

ermm.. ICQ :P

there's always Jabber, which you can run on your own server, all open source.

silc is more secure than irc

Personally, I like Jabber because it supports SSL and is similar to other IM clients. silc is also an interesting project. It's similar to IRC, but considerably more secure. On my website in the Software Directory, I've got several Chat and IM clients. All of them support encryption in some way. Some of them (like Jabber) have clients for other platforms.

Gaim - does the job for me :)

Is gaim not dependant upon other networks, which would seem to be what the question is trying to avoid? If not, how can you setup gaim to not be dependant, and simply "talk" url to url?

Cool

Thanks for all the info. Here's another thing i am looking for. The
app should also have support for Windows. This is because one
end is Linux and the other end is Windows.

Trillian is great. Just do a search for it on google.

Supports access to pretty much all clients...yahoo msn aim icq irc all in one app. Not sure if it supports linux though :).....
I use it on my windows machines

I believe that he was looking for something more than a client. He wanted the ability to provide his own service.

OIC...sorry for skimming :).