blog » August 24, 2005/Google launches instant messaging service

Google has officially launched its long-rumoured instant messaging service. (Google press release, /.) As expected by most in the industry, it is based on the Jabber protocol (a.k.a. XMPP), which is an open protocol that, like email, allows users to communicate with people on other servers.

Unfortunately, at the current time, it looks like Google Talk can’t communicate with other Jabber servers. With Google talking so much about interoperability and choice, I hope that this is just a temporary problem, and that they will open it up to other Jabber servers. If that happens, you Google Talk users out there can add me to your contact lists: uhoreg@amessage.info.

Google Talk also features voice chatting, using a custom Jabber-based protocol. However, Google says that they are planning on documenting the protocol, and hopefully they will make it into a JEP so that other Jabber clients can use it.

In short, it’s exciting news that a big company like Google is embracing an open instant messaging protocol. Maybe this is the beginning of the end of the interoperability problems that we have with all the different protocols — Yahoo!, AIM, ICQ, MSN, Gadu Gadu, etc. But we’ll have to see if Google really is open to other Jabber servers (which I would expect to be the case).