Google Talk is live
Google Talk service is now live although you still get a 404 at the site. I was able to connect with Adium using Jabber as the account type, and my gmail login.
Some notes:
- this is NOT jabber, it’s XMPP: Google Talk requires TLS for connection at port 5222;
- Server-to-server is not yet operational, don’t know if it will: SRV DNS records are still MIA;
- Port 5223 is open and Psi with SSL can connect. I used “Allow plaintext password”, but I’m not sure if it is required;
- Disco queries and Jabber:iq:agents return 503 for now;
- Gmail address book integration: your buddies appear in your contacts inside GMail;
- The other way around: Gmail contacts with a @gmail.com address appear in your roster with subscription none. Current clients don’t send the invitation automagically for now :).
- 1:41 WET: got kicked, server restart or premature err… launch? :); 2:33 back on.
Some other articles about this:
- Smash’s world: I found out from this article
- Rui’s take, although he hasn’t updated yet it’s page :). Ok, now he did, but use this instead
- My dear friend pfi, to the point as usual :)
- Celso’s point of view, lot’s of good stuff that I won’t duplicate here with one exception: federation not good.
- Bob Wyman at his best: use XMPP to track XMPP news. And also talking about Yahoo! and XMPP.
- A new edition of Jabber Journal, with lot’s of cool information
My take: I’ve been following XMPP for some years now, and tomorrow it will be a big day for all of us who believe that it is a excellent technology for IM and presence applications.
Although the service is still pretty basic, we are still poking in the dark to see what is out there. The small Gmail address book contact is something that a lot of people have talked about, but it might be the tip of the iceberg yet. I personally can only think about a Google-scale pubsub service. Imagine all those Google APIs with a push model to your desktop, using your XMPP stream. Bob Wyman is also talking about this.
Also, notice that server-to-server connectivity is still not there. And that’s the big one for me.
Will Google open up it’s network? I really really hope so.
In the following days and weeks to come, I’m going to find it interesting to see Yahoo, Skype and AIM response. MSN will be fun to see, at best.
AIM already has a server-to-server XMPP connectivity, but only to Jabber.Inc customers and the price point is not something to brag about, I’ve been told.
Yahoo and Skype don’t seem to have many technology barriers to implement a XMPP server-to-server gateway: all their clients share a single domain name under their control.
As for MSN, well, the only domains that they can open up to XMPP is the ones they control: hotmail.com. All the other MSN users that use their own email address to authenticate themselves into the MSN network are out of luck.
This new service, for those of us who work in the instant message area, is not a small issue, and it’s not hype. IM networks have been for some time isolated, closed islands, in which the only ways to interop are reverse-engineered software bridges like pyMSNt, pyMSNt or pyICQ, to name just a few.
But having a big name such as Google opening up it’s network, we get traction. Maybe enough of it to level the playing field.
It’s going to be a hell of a ride…