Openfire which is an implementation of Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP), a set of open XML technologies for presence and real-time communication developed by the Jabber open-source community. What is IM gateway plug in and how it relates to openfire? These are the primary questions that comes first in to account, following gives primary objective of IM gateway plug-in and how IM gateway plug-in enhance functionality of openfire.

The IM Gateway plug-in for Openfire provides connectivity to other IM networks (AIM, ICQ, IRC, MSN, Yahoo, etc). Project synchrona is not aiming at providing the functionality with is provided by IM networks, it's major goal is to enhance the functionality or services of existing internet services through real time messaging and data synchronization among services. That is how synchrona is different form others. So what basic question is how IM gateways can help synchrona for achieving this objective. currently we can find IM gateways which are working well with Openfire and some are currently in developement. These existing and working IM gateways allow openfire to retrive a given users friend list , basically you will be able to see your friends in Facebook in opefire client like spark, samePlace.

IM gate way for twitter.

http://blog.wolfspelz.de/2008/09/twix-twitter-to-jabber-xmpp-gateway.html

IM gate way for facebook and MySpace

But for with these implementations synchrona will provide IM gate way plugin for moodle and blogger and many other services.