Slashdot Mirror
Google Talk Claims Openness, Lacks S2S Support
rm writes "This LiveJournal entry by Nugget quite well sums up the disappointment in Google Talk among many Jabber users, caused by the service's complete lack of XMPP server-to-server communication support: '...Google has uncharacteristically missed the real strength of the Jabber design. Despite all their self-congratulation about open communications they've only embraced the smaller, less important aspect of the Jabber openness.'"
In that case you may want to try MSN. It allows non-hotmail e-mail addresses (in fact, it allowed invalid e-mail addresses, or at least did back in 2000).
Their client may not run on Linux yet but you can use Google Talk on Linux using gAIM or another Jabber complient client: http://www.google.com/talk/otherclients.html
From the google talk About page
1. What is "service choice" and how does Google Talk enable it?
Service choice is something you have with email and, for the most part, with your regular phone service today. This means that regardless of whom you choose as your email service provider (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, your school or ISP, etc), you can email anyone who is using another service provider. The same applies to phone service. You can call someone even if they do not use the same phone company as you do. This allows you to choose your service provider based on other more important factors, such as features, quality of service, and price, while still being able to talk to anyone you want.
Unfortunately, the same is not true with most popular IM and VOIP networks today. If the people you want to talk to are all on different IM/VOIP services, you need to sign up for an account on each service and connect to each service to talk to them.
We plan to partner with other willing service providers to enable federation of our services. This means that a user on one service can communicate with users on another service without needing to sign up for, or sign in with, each service.
and
1. What is "platform choice" and how does Google Talk enable it?
Platform choice means that you can connect to our service using the operating system and device of your choice. Google Talk enables platform choice by letting users of other operating systems connect to the Google Talk service using other IM clients.
I thingk that would qualifies for self-congratulation about open communications enabeling de s2s for talk would enable service coice at least for IM and hey it might still happen I mean it *is* still in beta
Leaders in the jabber community have made it fairly clear that s2s support just hasn't been coded yet. Its on its way.
I am positive that they are trying to figure out how to control SPAM that would happen if they opened up the S2S portion of their server.
I know that i'll be modded down for an unfunny comment to your witty remark... but GTalk doesn't even provide emoticons...
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
Well, from the FAQ on Google talk page you can read:
"4. What other communication services will you federate with?
We look forward to federating with any service provider who shares our belief in enabling user choice and open communications. We do believe, however, that it is important to balance openness with ensuring that we maintain a safe and reliable service that protects user privacy and blocks spam and other abuses."
They will be open, but in a slow way and only if your server can be trusted!
I'm curious what attributes you'd expect to see in a "more thoughtful" statement that don't exist in what I wrote.
I assure you, I wrote to be read and I spent quite a bit of time attempting to make a point via a coherent argument. Perhaps I failed at that endeavor, but judging from the bulk of the feedback I've gotten it looks like I succeeded on at least some level.
In any event, in that you've not chosen to read the article this thread is beyond a doubt an even greater waste of everybody's time.