[mikecarlucci]

Interestingly, if Microsoft does buy Skype and make it Windows only, they would be opening a huge door for GChat as [EDIT: the obvious] cross-platform client. FaceTime too, I guess, if Apple decides to move in that direction.

If Skype isn't the default, verbed, system, doesn't it lose some value?

[windsurfer]

GChat is already totally cross platform since it's just XMPP. There are tons of clients out there. You can run your own jabber server and connect to @gmail.com addresses, even.

[Sidnicious]

On that node, didn’t Apple say, via Steve Jobs at the presentation where it was announced, that FaceTime was to become an open standard? What ever happened to that?

[alanh]

He did, but that’s the last we’ve heard of it as of yet [last I heard it discussed]. I doubt they killed it forever though, it’s not like Apple to make a false announcement (vaporware); it is like Apple to de-prioritize the speed of open sourcing that stack over developing/improving/iterating their own implementation and/or iOS ecosystem as a whole.

[Maakuth]

For what I understood, the protocols are open, but you can't join in the network without a private key signed by Apple :). It seems to use fairly standard protocols though: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FaceTime#Standards