Google Talk to now interoperate with other Jabber based Instant Messengers

Google Talk to now interoperate with other Jabber based Instant Messengers

Search engine giants Google have announced their decision to open up Google Talk to other Instant Messaging services, which are based on the open source protocol Extensible Messaging, and Presence Protocol (XMPP). This means that any Jabber based Instant Messaging service could connect with Google Talk servers and let the users from these services communicate with each other.

Some of these services include open source IM applications like JabberNow and Earthlink. Google said in a statement that this was their way of improving upon interoperability between different chatting protocols. This comes as a lesson for the giants in the Instant Messaging markets like AOL, Microsoft MSN, and Yahoo!, which are still not communicating with each other.

However, MSN and Yahoo! had recently announced collaboration, which should allow users of any of these services to chat with the users on other service. However, the updated clients capable of doing so are yet to be made available to the regular web users. Google on their part have expressed their desire to create full, open interoperability, which it called federation.

The company said in a statement: “E-mail is an example of a federated network that enables people to communicate with one another, regardless of their email provider. Open interoperability is the first step towards bringing a similar level of openness and user choice to instant messaging and VoIP and with today’s deployment of open server-to-server federation Google Talk is enabling millions of people worldwide to communicate with each other instantly.”