Om Malik notes that Google Talkabout, the official Google Talk developer’s blog, Gary Burd released news that Google has finally opened up their Google Talk servers for federation with other Jabber servers.
What does this mean to the Google Talk user? Google Talk users can now chat with users on other XMPP services and vice versa. If you are running a Jabber server, you can set it up to communicate with the Google Talk servers and allow your users to communicate with Google Talk users. This is a huge step forward for instant messaging interoperability. Yes, it’s all using the standard XMPP protocol, but it begins to make the notion of a proprietary IM client seem archaic.
This announcement comes on the heals of sneak peeks at upcoming Google Talk functionality that previewed at CES earlier this month. With the announced interoperability with AIM, Google has covered the low end of the IM spectrum. With Jabber federation, they’ve covered the high end.
technorati tags: google, google talk, xmpp, jabber, instant messaging
Leave a Reply