Google Jabber Based IM?
After I was joking just yesterday that it would be great to have a major player with an open IM platform, along comes speculation that the Google release will be a Jabber based IM service. I have to admit I’m pretty intrigued. I’ve always liked XMPP, the protocol underlying Jabber. There have been all sorts of disputes about licenses and patents and who has the right to use what. And there are lots of XML purists out there who think that using streamed XML makes you a servant of Satan. But I thought XMPP took some great principles and blended them together. In particular, allowing for namespace divsion of messages and advertisement of capabilities in a way that was decoupled from the underlying transport. Just like, well, that whole internet thing. Deploying a new application on the Internet doesn’t require protocol changes to the core routers, and deploying a new application on top of Jabber doesn’t require changes to the core servers. I like that, I think that’s the way it should be. If Google deploys messaging services that build on those principles I’ll have to give them at least a little bit of respect. I think that would be a really fantastic and strong play.
August 24th, 2005 at 12:23 pm
[...] So the rumours from yesterday about Google releasing a Jabber based IM system are true. You can find out more about it at the Google Talk site. The stuff is standard enough that I had no problem connecting using GAIM under Linux, my preferred setup for IM. They even have instructions describing how to setup GAIM. Very cool. So of course the second step for me is trying out Agile Messenger to see if it connects. I wasn’t able to get it to. Maybe it doesn’t support TLS, or expects a different format for the “name@gmail.com” and then connect to server talk.google.com distinction. Anyone managed to get that working? [...]