Google opens up Google Talk

By Steve Malone

Posted on 18 Jan 2006 at 10:21

When Google Talk launched last year the company promised that interoperability would be a feature. The search engine has now announced that Talk will communicate or 'federate' with any service provider that supports the industry standard XMPP protocol. Among those companies Google Talk will communicate with are Earthlink, Gizmo Project, Tiscali, Netease, Chikka, MediaRing, and what Google says are thousands of other ISPs, universities, corporations and individual users.

Interoperability in the instant messaging sector has been demanded by users for many years. However, rivalry between the big three IM companies - Yahoo! Microsoft and AOL - has meant that any discussions on allowing their respective IM clients to talk to each other have stalled.

Among the clients which use the Jabber/XMPP protocol are Adium and iChat mainly used by OSX users and Trillian, Psi and Miranda mainly for Windows. Google Talk itself does not currently support the Mac or Linux although this has been promised for sometime in the future.

However, even taken together, these clients do not have the installed based that the products from the big three control. Nevertheless, Google Talk was very late to the game and needs to build a strong base of users who can communicate with it if the company is going to become a major player in the emerging social networking services.

While Google Talk is likely to get few favours from MSN and Yahoo! Messenger, the recent deal with AOL may mean that some interoperability with AIM and perhaps even the venerable ICQ IM client now owned by AOL.

Similarly, Google is also saying that it plans to open up its VoIP service by implementing SIP or 'Session Initiation Protocol'. Currently although there are many VoIP offerings which allow users talk to other customers on the same services or to landline, very few allow them to talk to users of other services. SIP is a standard to supports call forwarding to be deployed over IP networks thus enabling service providers to integrate basic IP telephony services with Web, e-mail, and chat services. It can not only be used for phone calls but also for audio/videoconferencing and interactive gaming.