Google's GTalk Supports XMPP

IceFox writes "On Google Gtalk blog Mike Jazayeri announced open federation for the Google Talk service. Nothing to do with Star Trek it means they now support open federation with any service provider that supports the industry standard XMPP protocol. Although they don't specifically mention AIM compatibility, at CES GTalk was shown with buddy icons so it can't be that far away."

Comments

Linux?

[kote-men-do]

We should really slap google (by means of some sort of "internetworked slapping device") for not supporting desktop linux... Gtalk, gvideo store, their desktop search appliance, ... No linux versions for any of these!

Very disappointing if you ask me.

Buddy Icons

[FooAtWFU]

Uhh, I don't know if you realize this, but plenty of other protocols besides AIM support buddy icons- Yahoo! Instant Messanger, MSN Instant Messanger, Jabber (which is XMPP itself)...

AIM may be coming or it may not but don't rely on the buddy icons to tell you.

Re:Buddy Icons

[IamTheRealMike]

And buddy icons are a pretty essential feature for any modern IM network/client anyway. It's things like this that the Jabber guys never really understood or targetted ... if you look at the JEPs which have actually been formally accepted on top of the core protocol, an RPC framework is one of them, buddy icons are not. I believe the Jabber buddyicon support coming up in GTalk is simply reusing a hack Apple added for iChat.

Re:Reposting comment

[linuxmop]

It's nice that Google has enabled s2s support, but I don't really see this as a big move. The lack of Google Talk support is (was) not holding back federated XMPP. The lack of users is. And frankly, there is simply no motivation for most users to switch to a Jabber-based system right now.

For Jabber to become the dominant IM service, it would require a critical mass of users. The best way for that to happen today would be AIM or MSN to support XMPP with s2s since it would not require the millions of existing users to change their behavior.

This is unlikely to occur. We have heard that Google is planning on somehow providing AIM support. However, based on the few articles out there that discuss this, it sounds like you will have to have an AIM account in addition to your XMPP account. This absolutely defeats the purpose of "combining" the networks, since you will still have two handles: your Jabber address, and your AIM screenname. I could already do that with Jabber transports and/or Gaim/Trillian multi-IM support.

Here's hoping that the news reports got it wrong and that AIM users will be able to communicate natively with XMPP users. If not, Google Talk will be a failed experiment.

Re:More Google Talk Resources

[moranar]

Don't forget that Adium "does all that GAIM stuff" because it uses libgaim.
In the best Unix tradition of decoupling function and form.

Re:How is SPIM handled?

[Gadzinka]

Standard way to handle SPIM in jabber network is to silently drop messages from people not on your contact list. And the only way to be added to my roster is to get my authorisation first.

Of course, one could still spim me with authorisation requests containing relevant viagra/penis/mortgage/nigerian information in description, but nothing prevents you from doing the same on closed networks...

In the end, the only way to stop spim would be to use aproaches similar to mail: some bayesian aproach, with the distinction that everybody on my roster is whitelisted. After all, forging sender on XMPP messages is for all intents and purposes impossible -- Jabber, later standardised as XMPP uses callback for sender authentication.

Robert

PS Someone already asked abou it: SPIM is Spam-over-IM