Google Talk is live

melo@simplicidade.org (Pedro Melo) — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 00:42:55 +0000

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…

Technorati Tags: google, jabber, talk, xmpp

Yahoo changes IM protocol

melo@simplicidade.org (Pedro Melo) — Fri, 25 Jun 2004 12:41:25 +0000

Yahoo changed their IM protocol once again. The official reason is to prevent IM spam (or spim). I felt this in the flesh yesterday, when my client Proteus refused to connect to Yahoo network, but I didn’t have a clear opinion about this. Parts of Jeremy post helped me put it all in perspective.

First, I never got IM spam over Yahoo or any other network, so my perspective over this could be somewhat biased.

IM spam is nothing like mail spam. IM solutions have from the start the concept of establishing a trust relationship between two users. All the clients I know have a checkbox (the good ones make it the default) that only allows people in your buddy list to send you messages. So the spam issue, at least for me, is a non-issue.

The other issue people are talking about is that “It’s Yahoo network, it’s Yahoo protocol, and it’s Yahoo resources, so they can do with them whatever they want”. Well, yes it’s true. But thats a shallow analysis of the problem.

Think about why trillian and others have to, or want to reverse engineer the Yahoo protocol. I came up with two reasons:

there is a user demand of a multi-network application: my friends are in multiple networks, and I want to talk to them without having to run multiple clients;
Yahoo does not have a open-protocol gateway to the outside.

The first one is interesting to me: the current official clients for the major networks are not good enough, they have limitations, because they cannot connect to multiple networks. So the market has this need, and the major networks choose not to compete, but to stifle competition by starting a arms race that they have little chance of winning, while pissing of their own or potencial customers. Smart, eh?

The second is more subtle. Given that the spam issue in IM networks is moot, I don’t see a reason for Yahoo and the other networks not having a open transport gateway. Jabber or SIMPLE, for instance.

In my view, if they had one, they would be giving more power to their own users, and give them a reason to stay with Yahoo network, and use their own client. It would become the race for the best client, and frankly, I don’t see what Yahoo and the others fear in that race: they have the resources and the content integration to provide the best IM client out there, hands down.

Imagine this: Yahoo and the others open up a Jabber gateway, and launch a new client to match. “Talk to anybody in the world, and you can still get personalized news feeds, your calendar, your mail notifications, in a single app”.

I’m a believer in real-time always-on internet. I don’t need super-amounts of bandwidth, but I need it there, all the time. I would love to see a application that would be the center of my internet presence, gathering all my friends, all the events of my online life: mail notifications, IM messages, calendar notifications, new post in my favorite feeds. I see it as: a social network-based app (maybe Google will open Orkut via an API…), with touches of dashboard for cross-linking of information. Add mobile connectivity (GPRS or better), a PDA or smart-phone, and your done!

We can only hope…

Im on Notes

Google Talk is live

Yahoo changes IM protocol