Tue

Aug 23
2005

Nat Torkington

Nat Torkington

Google Talk Released

Google Talk, the Jabber-based IM system for everyone with a gmail account, was unveiled Tuesday night. It's the second big win for Jabber this year, after Mac OS X Tiger shipped with a workgroup IM system in OS X Server based on Jabber. Why is Jabber cool? It's an open standard--the big boys (Yahoo!, MSN, AOL) are notorious for pissing matches over interop that make MMS messaging on cellphone look like a W3C hot-tub party. Anyone can run a server or build a commercial IM system. Heck, you can even have programs sending and receiving IMs without seeing the "you have sent too many messages in too short a time. Please wait and try again" message of doom.

Like other modern IM clients, Google Talk handles voice. Here the interop story is much less strong. The docs say: "Google Talk supports a custom XMPP-based signaling protocol and peer-to-peer communication mechanism. We will fully document this protocol. In the near future, we plan to support SIP signaling." SIP is the key, I think--it's the protocol underneath a lot of VoIP software and there are many very interoperable internet telephony systems built on SIP. Once they add SIP, Google Talk rather easily turns into a system with all of Skype's features. (Though, of course, it can't interop with Skype because Skype is a proprietary closed protocol).

Most interesting will be how Google assimilates the IM offering. Will they offer central indexing of chats or will it all be through the Google Desktop Toolbar? (they say: "Google does not collect the content of instant message chats or voice conversations") Will they open source the Google Talk client so there can be Mac and Linux ports? (remember the promise to "fully document this protocol", which is a start but not the same as open sourcing) Will they offer IM as well as mail as options for alerts? Will there be a google@gmail.com that I can IM queries to, in the same way that I can SMS GOOGL? Picasa integration? Maps? How long until they add ads? There are many unanswered questions here.

Kudos to the Google Talk team for the great FAQs (there are even developer FAQs for nerds like me). It's a pleasure to see a service launch with solid documentation and straight-up answers to some of the first questions I had. Now it's a matter of waiting to see what the answers to the other questions will be ...


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Comments: 11

  FJ [08.24.05 02:34 AM]

"...make MMS messaging on cellphone look like a W3C hot-tub party..."

Please accept all my warmest and most sincere congratulations on finding the one and only way to describe both MMS messaging and instant messaging on the web! :)

FJ

  Christian Romney [08.24.05 07:28 AM]

You give them too much credit. For a company that runs tens of thousands of machines on Linux, and uses open source software at every step (see Google Video as well) you'd think they could make just a tiny effort to release some software for the Mac and Linux. Google seems to have made a conscious decision NOT to release software for anything but Windows.

  Max Hyatt [08.24.05 09:32 AM]

I think they deserve such praise. I do believe they will release a Mac/Linux client. I think its the number of users that use Windows is the reason why the release software for windows. If they were to go off google.com stats alone, the number of users that search using WIN vs Mac/Linux would be a good enough reason to develop it in Windows 1st.

You make a good point, but I don't think they were leaving Mac/Linux out on purpose. They are just supplying for the demand, and Windows wins that.

  Julien Couvreur [08.24.05 10:37 AM]

Re: "Heck, you can even have programs sending and receiving IMs without seeing the "you have sent too many messages in too short a time. Please wait and try again" message of doom."

Welcome SPAM.

  Owen [08.24.05 11:00 AM]

I understand that their VOIP currently actually IS based on Skype.

  Brock [08.24.05 06:24 PM]

It's not based on Skype. As I understand it, Skype and Talk use the same sound codecs (just like there's WMA, AAC, and MP3 in music, there are multiple VoIP codecs).

  adi [11.14.06 03:31 AM]

i want to download mms software in which i can make mms

  Cedric Salyer [11.16.06 10:09 PM]

Doctor Who takes three prizes at the National Television Awards in a repeat of its success last year...

  Chris [03.09.07 06:49 AM]

It is very upsetting to me that I cannot use the Google Talk voice with iChat or any other instant messenger on my Mac. They don't even need to release a Google Talk client for the Mac they just need to add voice support to one of the existing open source instant messengers, or work with Apple to release voice support on iChat. I'm beginning to lose faith in Google.

  Caleb [07.29.07 09:25 PM]

Psi has jingle functionality for OS X and Linux (but not Windows, yet) in nightly/beta build.

  Shashi [08.10.07 07:19 AM]

Jee the Protocol Specs are Not clear!!!

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