Dudley and Wes Carr at 2Entwine have released the 1.2 Preview Release of the Gush instant messaging client (see Gush Blog: Gush 1.2 Preview Release).

The single biggest change is the extension of the client's existing RSS feature set with the option to create new or reuse existing PubSub Concepts aggregated feeds.

Above, I created a new feed within Gush -- of course you have to have or create a PubSub account. I did find an interesting (painful) bug in the PubSub interface -- it stripped out the quotation marks! Apparently PubSub are working on a fix, but in the meantime I recommend defining all feeds at PubSub. Apparently, this glitch has been fixed already! Once connected, all your existing feeds are pulled into Gush automatically.

Below you see the "instant messaging" feed I defined (click to see fullsize image). Note the little side aggregation on the right hand of the defined feed, which are the headlines of all the defined feeds at my PubSub account.

The guys at 2Entwine have laid out a roadmap for additional features, some of which I really, really need, like multichat, file transfer, and nested groups.

Keep it up, boys.