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.